


Half His Foe

by lesshoney



Category: Dragon Age II
Genre: M/M, Mpreg
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-02-06
Updated: 2015-05-25
Packaged: 2018-01-11 09:21:07
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 18
Words: 76,299
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1171378
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lesshoney/pseuds/lesshoney
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Anders and Hawke do terrible things to each other, but the worst thing Anders ever does to Hawke comes in a moment of love. </p><p>Rivalmance. Later chapters include non-con.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Explanatory note: This story was first posted on the DA kinkmeme. Offline Life got busy and I dropped the ball in a big way, despite the kindness and patience of readers over on the kmeme. But the story stayed with me - the only way I'll get it out of my head is if I finish it, or die - and this time we will see the end.

**Present Day**

Anders lay where he had fallen, gazing with half-open eyes down the marble steps of Templar Hall. The mouth of the Gallows. He watched dark rivulets of blood inch across the stone steps, seep to the edge, to the stair below, like thick fingers of wax down a candle. His blood? He couldn’t be sure. There were others beside him. Mages. His brothers and sisters. The hard wedge of the stairs, the heaviness of his chest and the heart inside it, made it hard to breathe. Justice’s strength was still in him, but fading, as he turned away from Anders. He sensed it was almost time to leave. Time to be free.

_What am I doing?_

A little late to start asking that now. Seven years. His ice-cold hand reached and his fingers splayed, as if to count them. So many mistakes. So many things he should, shouldn’t have done.

_What am I doing?_

Dying.

He laughed. He couldn’t help it. It was just... suddenly... _funny_. He had tried so hard, and here he was. How could it have gone any other way, with Hawke standing against them? Another rasping, gurgling half-sob shook his shoulders. Then something inside came loose, he coughed, and he tasted fresh, hot blood. 

The courtyard was flanked on either side by facades with narrow, prison-cell windows, and bodies were scattered across its white flagstones. Carrion birds were picking over the dead, chattering to each other. He could just see them when he raised his eyes. Rolling the bodies over with their big, bright talons... No, they were men in armor, templars. 

One climbed the staircase toward him. He saw scuffed boots, then a knee in front of his face as the templar knelt and examined him. Justice reared up, but all Anders’s body managed was a jerk and spasm as broken bones ground and severed tendons plucked uselessly. 

“This one’s alive.” It was a young voice. 

A much harder, surer voice answered the first. “Not for long.”

Anders’s eyes drifted to the other pair of boots coming up the steps toward him. 

“Do we keep to the Rite?” the younger voice asked. It sounded like he hoped not, like he hoped the killing was over. 

No stomach for it. At their feet, Anders sneered, baring his bloody teeth. 

“What does the Champion want with prisoners?” The older templar stood over Anders, toed his forehead, then tipped Anders’s face toward the light. “Wait, wait. Look who it is.”

“Sir?”

“Fetch the Champion.”

**Two Months Earlier**

The noon sun shone on a dozen small figures keeping neat pace as they followed the high shore of the Wounded Coast. Their march was too orderly for them to be smugglers, pirates, thieves or refugees. They were well-equipped, too, and a number of them wore the proud armor of the chantry, though there was an odd-one-out element to their band.

Anders was restless as he walked in the templars’ midst. Like a mabari wrangler in a kennel full of tainted, unpredictable hounds, every cleared throat or wrist wiped across a sweating forehead caught his eye. It had started out a good day. A usual day, one of those when he followed Hawke on some errand, some little bit of not much important. Varric had a job for them: a ship, lost some cargo overboard during last night’s storms. Guild stuff. Find it, bring it back, make a small fortune in finder’s fees. 

They had been moving down to the beaches when they ran into the templars. Ser Cullen was leading them. They had a handful of phylacteries and were closing in on a group of mages escaped from the Circle in Ostwick, hiding in one of the coast’s tide-soaked caves. 

Hawke was too ready to help. He didn’t asked for opinions, or even glance at Anders -- he knew very well how Anders felt. He was at the head of the group now, beside Ser Cullen. Anders looked at the back of Hawke’s head, the black braid of his hair against the brilliant shine of his armor and the dark brown nape of his neck, and felt the familiar pull of love and anger. It could have been a good day.

One of the templars stepped close and clipped and jostled his shoulder. Anders jumped, instantly tense, and Aveline almost stumbled into his back as he came up short. The templar and his fellows halted, too, even as Hawke and Ser Cullen kept moving. 

Never let them get you in a corner. Never let them surround you. Never... old and hard-learned lessons played in his head as Anders stared at the templars.

“Careful, apostate.” The templar grinned.

He was a bully. In two words, Anders could hear echoes of all the miseries the man had wrought. Anders knew that voice, and dozens just like it. ‘Come on, little mage, let’s play a game.’ 

Then the templar walked on. It was over before Anders could say a word. Just a quick reminder of who he was. What he was. That this freedom to walk along the shore in the sun wasn’t real and wouldn’t last. He had been at the Champion’s side for years, but they would always be waiting.

Anders breathed again, made himself fall back into step. Varric, beside him, gave him a quiet, commiserating smile. Hawke never glanced back.

They spent half an hour starting down paths, retracting their steps, winding up onto rises and back down, following the phylacteries’ guide, and then they reached the cave. They grouped outside, catching their breath and readying themselves for the dangerous part. The templars strapped their boots and gauntlets tight, experimentally pulled swords in and out of their sheaths. The air was abuzz with tension and the high, glowing hum of the phylacteries. The sound reverberated in him, made Anders sick in the pit of his stomach. 

The cave mouth was little more than a crack in the crumbling, sandy cliffs. The interior was dark, and the templars were wrapping oil-soaked rags around driftwood to use as torches. They would have to go in single-file, and if the cave had been hollowed out by water trickling over the ages, it would be a maze of twists and dead ends. Hawke would be in the lead, far away. Anders could fight for himself, but all it would take was a silencing spell to ‘rebound’ and he’d be defenseless. Too many dark places. Never let them corner you. Never let them surround you.

“Three in front,” Ser Cullen ordered, and the templars clustered up. 

Hawke was giving orders to his own, eying the cave’s jagged entrance. “Aveline, with me. Varric, Anders, hang back and --” 

Anders raised his hand and shook his head firmly. “I’m not going in there.” 

An uncomfortable _stop_ to everything. Hawke finally, finally turned and looked at him. 

“I’m not going.” His hands twitched. 

Ser Cullen had the delicacy to avert his eyes from their scene. Other templars watched with something wolfish in their faces. Anders remembered those looks. Dangerous and condescending. Behave, and you were a poor, dumb, cowed little thing, shepherded with the sort of pity usually found in a farmyard. Misbehave, and you were a foot-stomping, tantrum-throwing child. Try to prove you were a man, that you could think, reason, _act_ , and it must be demons. You couldn’t win. A child of the Circle never grew up. He wasn’t a man to them; just a mage.

The templars saw Hawke as his nanny. They had patronizing half-smiles, waiting to see if Hawke would offer him a sweetie to shut him up or backhand him across the face. A mutinying mage was always a bit of fun.

Anders inhaled deeply, drawing air into his lungs to give Justice and his growing anger less room. Right this second, his fight wasn’t with them.

“We need you.” Hawke wasn’t going to argue about it. 

His instinct was always to follow Hawke, but with the phylacteries ringing in his ears, Anders held firm. “No.” He had been party to this sort of thing before and the dissonance - talking himself in circles, convincing himself _those_ mages had somehow deserved it - had almost killed him. He was hanging onto his last few fingerfuls of sanity as it was. 

Hawke gauged him, took a measure of his strength with his dark eyes, and Anders’s heart gave that familiar rush. Hawke had nothing to prove to these templars. Hawke took him seriously. (It was stupid to be so grateful, but he needed to know that someone did.) They disagreed about too much, but at the bottom of it all, Hawke wasn’t a bad man. He wasn’t like _them_. Anders would never have loved him if he were. 

The longer they tarried, the greater chance they would lose the element of surprise. His voice was clipped, annoyed, but they had to move. “Suit yourself.”

Again, those looks from the templars. Disapproving, disappointed, that Hawke would let the spoiled child have his way. Nothing they liked more than a hard yank on the leash. Aveline’s face was grim.

Anders turned his back and walked a few paces away to find a spot out of the sun. 

“Can I stay out here too?” Varric asked lightly; leave it to the dwarf to take a hammer to the atmosphere. 

Hawke grunted. 

Varric sighed playfully. “Thought not.”

The templars save one, Hawke, Varric, and Aveline formed up, and one by one they disappeared into the cave.

Anders sat himself on a rock in the small star of shade, courtesy of one very spindly tree. The lone templar beside him was a thin-featured, glassy-eyed, nervous man. Probably his first time all alone with an apostate, Anders thought, and his fingers flexed into claws. Grrr. Aaargh.

Anders watched from the corner of his eye as the man paced up and down outside the cave, looking from Anders, out to sea, down at the sand rushing into his boot prints. Vengeance told him this one would be easy prey. 

Anders put a hand to his forehead to shade his face and searched the horizon. The Waking Sea was calm and heavily silver, like mercury, and the few waves were rolling reflections of the high sun’s light. The air was thick and silent but for the shore birds, circling and diving at the water, crying to each other in bloody excitement as they hauled their squirming, helpless prizes out of the waves. 

Sudden _human_ screams rent the air, as the cave mouth turned out two templars in full retreat, scrambling with swords still in hand and churning up the sand. Once in the open they rounded, shouting to warn the others. Anders sprang up, whirled his staff to the ready, and the thin, nervous templar drew his sword and touched the hilt quickly to his forehead.

Ser Cullen was shouting inside, trying to be heard over the inhuman roar that filled the air, and then -- silence.

The bloodied templars, Anders, and his nervous watcher all glanced at one another, united for a fraction of a second in their common fear. Movement at the cave’s mouth, part of its deep shadow detached, staggered, and the templars raised their swords.

It was Aveline, crawling out into the sun. “Anders - Hawke -”

One of the templars put out his glove and yanked her to her feet. She had lost her sword, and the armor down her right arm was missing from the shoulder. Blood was running from a swipe across her shoulder, she clapped her other hand to it as Anders came nearer.

Ser Cullen came next, looking pale. Six of his men had gone in. Three had come out. And the worst of it -- 

The last templar and Varric, with Hawke’s body dragging between them. He was still conscious. He looked up at Anders as they pulled him into the daylight, and Anders forgot everything else at the sight of him.

They heaved him onto the sand, and Anders dropped to his knees beside him. 

“Never seen anything like it -- not even that Harrowing -” The templars’ tongues were loose with fear and giddy with being alive.

“Should have burned them out,” one of the templars was protesting, and Ser Cullen snapped at them all to shut their mouths. He was watching Anders, kneeling over the Champion. 

Anders would have felt how bad it was, even if he couldn’t _see_. He felt a life force rapidly losing its heat and light, running away like the blood soaking Hawke’s clothes. Hawke’s chest piece had been clawed open. Deep wounds were gouged low across his stomach, open enough to glimpse the pale greyish of insides before more blood welled to cover them in crimson. His arm, too, was useless, twisted up and broken, and covered in red from shoulder to wrist. Anders’s hands lit up. Time wasn’t generous.

Anders wasn’t sure where to turn his energies first. They trained healers with a lot of metaphors, to put words to the visceral feelings of health and hurt. Life was water in a reservoir, illness and injury were floodgates. If he could close the gates, keep the life from running out of him... He heard Hawke whimper. Hawke had large, clear, deeply brown eyes. They had been wide with pain and surprise, and now they were glazing from shock. 

Anders put a hand to the neat, dark line of beard that traced Hawke’s jaw. His face was taking on a deep-set pallor as he lost blood, his lips were going blue. “I’m here.”

Hawke’s eyes closed and Anders went to work desperately, plunging his energies into the insatiable hurt, a well so deep he couldn’t find the bottom... He worked, tried to staunch the life force’s flow, but it was like groping into nothing, looking for purchase but finding only empty air. Hawke’s flesh was under his hands, ruined and torn, the blood welled up again and again as Anders tried to close the wounds. He felt Hawke’s heart shudder as it stumbled from its frantic clip, and seized. 

Weariness was already wrapping around Anders’s bones. He only had so much to give. It wouldn’t be enough. There was too much damage, too deep, Anders couldn’t stem the tide, and Hawke wasn’t rallying for him. _Maker, please._

A new kind of frantic seized him. He wouldn’t be left here alone. He had to convince Hawke - Hawke was the only one who could save him, the only one who loved him. He could make Hawke see. He just needed _time_. 

He didn’t have time. Hawke was so weak...

Ser Cullen, Aveline, and Varric were watching him. He put his hand down in the sand beside Hawke’s body, breathing hard, trying to gather more of his strength. He shakily touched Hawke’s face, and then he looked down at his palm. The sand was wet with blood and it had left a gritty, red streak across his hand. Spilled blood. He sniffed it like an animal. 

This was wrong. He heard an alarm, distant, booming bells in his skull. But there were no demons here. 

Just Hawke, dying. 

He began again. He reached out for that forbidden power. It hit him all in a rush, the moment he opened himself to it. It was like flying, like he could take this world in his hands and do anything he wanted with it. His innermost being warned him, Justice warned him, but he was desperate and he didn’t care. He was delving deeper, touching this reality more profoundly than he ever could manage on his own -- no wonder this was forbidden. He still had enough mindfulness to know he was skirting chaos, that undercurrent of all things. 

Hawke was still precarious. He needed _more_.

Anders felt the tipping, breaking point, the line of no return. He pressed. Something gave. Order went tumbling into the abyss as he worked from fear and adrenaline. Tissues closed, knit, reformed, changed, and the power in all of that blood fed into his own, making it brighter, turning his thoughts blinding-white. 

Then Anders stopped short, gasping. 

There was something else in Hawke’s blood. Anders frowned, shaken out of his focus, and turned toward this new, strange - lyrium. He glanced up at Hawke’s face, unconscious and bloody. He had been spending time with the Meredith. Anders had assumed -- Hawke had _told_ him -- it was just part of his role as Champion. But this was... this was something more. He was training as one of them? He was learning the things they did? Learning to brutalize, throw the silence around himself, make mages helpless?

Anders was shaking and he backed away. Hawke would live. He had done... he had done more than he intended, but Hawke would live. In that moment, Anders wasn’t sure he wanted him to.

Aveline was still watching, almost holding her breath. Anders pushed away from the man on the ground, got to his feet, and moved unsteadily toward her. He looked like he was in pain, too. 

Aveline stepped forward to offer him her arm, but he managed to grab his staff. He looped an arm around it and held tight, leaning on it heavily. 

“What of the Champion?” Ser Cullen asked.

Anders was staring hard at nothing. Did they know what he had done? Aveline reached out, but Anders shrank back. He shook his head. He still couldn’t look at the templar. 

“He’ll live.”


	2. Chapter 2

House arrest ended when Hawke got back on his feet. Anders was waiting in the main hall, desperate to be anywhere but under templar eyes. Ser Cullen came down the stairs from a short interview with the Champion, satisfied with more promises to keep the leash tight -- and gave the fidgeting apostate a cool look. 

Anders balled up his hands. No matter how he scrubbed, he smelled Hawke’s iron blood in the beds of his nails. He stared at Ser Cullen.

Like a mouse caught under a glass, Ser Cullen thought, as the mage waited on his word. Cullen hoped he was enjoying his freedom while it lasted. It had been a close thing. 

Ser Cullen gave the nod of approval to his men and Anders swept past them, out into Hightown. He went without direction. The streets were almost empty in the hottest part of the day and he took long strides, finally free to cast off nervous guilty energy without fear of crashing into the walls. 

The air was still. It had been hanging on the city for days. A heavy pocket of it was trapped this side of the mountains, on the plain between the peaks and the sea. It promised a dreadful hot summer, but Anders, still feeling numb, took no notice. The streets gleamed white with midday heat and his mind fled down its dark halls. 

He’d once spent a year in solitary. The numbness had set in during his time in the dark. Some days he had screamed until he couldn’t any more, just for something to do, just for a human voice in his ears. He had been desperate for the sight and sound, Maker, even the _smell_ of others. Humanity was intercourse, alone he was an animal. Sense had gone. The walls had felt ten feet thick, he was sure the ceiling sagged - he would sleep huddled under the rickety cot, wake up in terror, sure he heard the first rumble of collapse. (When they came in to muck out the cell he saw the sturdiness, the impervious stone, it had stood ages since and would for ages to come - the rock was seamless stuff, set in place by the same magic that had made the world. But the moment their blessed torchlight left, the door was sealed up, the ceiling buckled and the walls closed in against his skin.)

Strange Varric should be home in the middle of the day, with a pint of Anders’s favorite - the Hanging Man’s least wretched - lager waiting.

Anders wasn’t ready to sit still, but Varric’s smooth voice captured him for a time. Varric’s was a friendly door to call on after a long time locked away; he brought life back all in a rush. Filled you up with drink and food and gossip, and it didn’t matter if most of it was lies. He wove you back into the story. Anders finally took a moment to feel the tabletop beneath his elbows, and the thick glass between his palms.

Fenris arrived when Anders had only managed to get a first drink down his throat, and he wasn’t strong enough to face the elf. He made another quick escape, this time into the cool depths of Darktown.

The lamp was still lit at the clinic’s door. It was kept burning by a small handful of volunteers who didn’t expect much of him anymore. This neatly-swept corner of Darktown had become theirs. He was still welcome, but they knew full well he came more to hide from his own demons than excise anyone else’s. (Justice had noticed, too, and dispensed his disapproval in Anders’s head, filling Anders with nerves and guilt and shame. Another in the long line of mantles he had dropped, causes he had abandoned.) He greeted the straggle of volunteers quietly, and moved quickly to the back room. 

He had a small cache secreted beside the few tattered tools of his trade. Sela Petrae and Drakenstone, hidden behind a few books full of illustrations of joints, brains, and poxes. He swept things off of his work bench and set the two packets on its scarred wood, patchy with splashed acids and faded bloodstains. 

Life without Hawke was impossible. Recent days had shown him that. Life _with_ Hawke... He rolled out a piece of thin, glossy leather, and smoothed it. Dark flecks lodged under his fingernails. Nothing was certain, everything was monstrous.

It was dusk when he returned to the Amell estate. No templars guarding the door. Bodahn let him in as cheerfully as ever, as if Anders wasn’t an escaped convict seeking asylum. He noticed _nothing_ , he played the truest servile spirit who had ever walked the earth. Master Hawke was upstairs, he said. They had already served dinner. If Master Anders needed something, he should come down to the kitchens. “And Serah Hawke has been waiting on your return.”

Anders swallowed. The incense of the chantry was stuck like slime in his throat. He thanked Bodahn, more sullen than gracious, and went to find Hawke.

Their bedroom was empty. Anders followed the hallway to the emptier wing of the house, where Bodahn and Sandal had their set of rooms. There was a large room here with a scuffed wooden floor and a cavernous fireplace at one end. Anders knew Hawke’s mother had long talked about putting some flesh to the dusty ghosts of her memory, making it back into the dining hall where her family used to entertain the city’s Viscounts and Champions. She had been distracted with her suitor, and then... The table sets and linens had arrived soon after. They were in the cellars, still in their crates.

Anders pushed the door open. The fire was lit, blazing in its enormous hearth, and Hawke’s suits of armor were gleaming at attention on their stands. Hawke had made the room his own, a sort of armory. Made it “useful”. He wasn’t one to give dinner parties. Anders looked down the long room. Hawke’s shadow was whirling across the floor, thin and graceful, and Anders’s eyes followed the dark dancer to the man himself.

He was shirtless and slicing at the fire-lit air with tense, balanced swipes of his broadsword, making measured arcs of flashing steel. He seemed not to notice when Anders raised his voice and said his name, too caught up in his focus.

Anders stepped just inside, folded his arms, leaned against the heavy block of the doorway, and watched him move. The swing of Hawke’s shoulders and hips, the poised control, made his mouth go dry. There were beads of sweat on Hawke’s dark skin, and a shimmering stain of it across his shoulders, down his chest. There was no sound except short breaths and the blade’s low, whistling song in the shadows, as he pushed himself through another few stances, muscles bulging and flowing with tight discipline. Anders had an answering tightness in the pit of his stomach.

Hawke finished stepping through the moves and brought the blade, with some effort, to a halt. It had been a short session. His limbs were already burning, and his breath stung in his lungs. He hefted the sword, two-handed, and hung it in its place on the wall.

“You’re back,” he said, as Anders came closer.

Anders nodded. He had come prepared for scrutiny; he had a pattern of lies woven through their lives. If Hawke cared enough to dig and pull at some of the threads it would leave him naked, but Hawke never seemed too curious. Perhaps tonight would be the night. They hadn’t fought in weeks. They were due for another round. 

Not tonight. Hawke was distracted. He rolled his neck and shoulders, trying to stretch the tension away. “There’s something off,” he said. “Something’s... different.” His balance was off-centered, his movements were strange.

“You were hurt.” Anders stressed the last word. “I’m just glad to see you up and about.” He ran his eyes over Hawke’s sweating body. “Or not. Don’t push yourself. You should probably be in bed.”

Hawke smiled suddenly. He crossed his arms, and Anders watched the muscles bunch, the fold of strong forearms against his chest. He could smell Hawke, too, the tang of exercise and exertion in the air. Anders felt himself going rigid beneath his clothes.

“I don’t think it’s a good idea,” Anders said, rather roughly. Healer. Healer before lover. He couldn’t ignore the scars. They would fade away to near nothing, thanks to Anders’s skill, but tonight they were still stark, greyish, puckered lines through Hawke’s flesh, just above his low waistband.

Hawke was close. He reached out, tapped Anders’s belt and sending a shock through his stomach, and grabbed at him though the rough fabric of his shirt. He palmed the unmistakable hardness, pressing Anders in his hand, and grinned. “I think you do.”

He had come back because he had to, but this. This was hope. He reached for Hawke’s hand.

* * *

Hawke pushed the bottle of oil at him. “Your turn tonight.”

Anders reached up and closed his hand around the smooth glass as Hawke’s rough fingers relinquished it. “Really?” Hawke, lately, had been very... inflexible in what he wanted. Where. When.

A nonchalant shrug from his lover, striding him. Anders was flat on his back, pale and naked on the patterned sheets, beneath Hawke’s bare, dark-bronzed body. Hawke reached between them, jostling his and Anders’s rubbing erections aside, and traced his new scars with a fingertip. “I owe you one, don’t I?”

Anders frowned. “Don’t make it sound like... business. A book of accounts.” It made him wonder what he was really worth to Hawke. What would happen if Hawke ever felt he was getting diminishing returns.

Hawke laughed. He swung off of Anders, pulled the pillow from beneath him as the mage sat up and followed.

“All right. I _want_ you to fuck me. Fuck me like a whore, biting the pillow at the Blooming Rose.” He made a quick, pleading face, and then he smiled again at Anders’s look. “Does that make it better?” He had the pillows arranged, and now he lay back against them, thighs spread, hard, inviting.

His playfulness was always fanged. Anders had learned to take the small lashes. It was all part of Hawke -- he left bites on Anders’s skin, he left scratches on Anders’s heart. “You are impossible.”

“Maybe.” Hawke’s bright eyes were drawing him.

Anders pushed apart his thighs, tickling the back of Hawke’s knees with his thumb nails, and leaned in to kiss the shaft and the dark hair at his groin. He nudged Hawke’s leg up over his shoulder, baring him wide. He slid his fingers into the small, tight ring and started a gentle, circling stretch. “Tell me if it hurts.”

Hawke growled an agreement, somewhere above him. He liked Anders’s hands. One between his legs, two long fingers caressing him inside, sliding in and pulling out slowly. He could feel each bony knuckle rubbing firmly against him, relaxing him, and Anders’s rough, warm tongue. He looked dreamily at the canopy as Anders’s other hand rubbed up his chest, fingering the dusky smudge of one nipple with his thin thumb pad, rolling it against the hard muscle and bone beneath with just enough pinching pressure. Hawke shivered and felt the waves building in his belly, tense little squeezes and pounding blood, and the first seeping drops beading on his tip.

Anders let his fingers work into the tightness slowly. Hawke was already panting, a hand was in his hair, guiding him as he wrapped Hawke with gentle sucks. He put the thick shaft in his mouth, swallowed around the weight and shape of it, then let it bob free and used more delicate, tasting licks. Salty, dried sweat, pre-cum, all of it took on a deep taste as he inhaled the musky, unwashed smell of Hawke’s body, and felt himself already wound up, on the edge of release. He touched his lips to the lightish head and its small, leaking slit, and nosed up the curly trail of hair that spread across Hawke’s stomach. Again, the raised scars. Anders put his mouth very gently against them, and Hawke gave his hair a quick tug.

Anders lifted his eyes. 

“Thank you,” Hawke said. He wasn’t an ungrateful man. 

Anders’s face soften, some of the worry that tensed the corners of his eyes disappeared. He curled his fingers upward, rubbing that dense patch of nerves. Hawke dragged in a contented, groaning breath.

Anders slipped his fingers out, drizzled more oil on his palm, and spread it quickly over himself. He leaned over Hawke, feeling Hawke’s tip drag across him, smearing a warm trail of moisture. Anders kissed him, deeply, pressing forward with his mouth and his weight, sinking Hawke into the soft pillows. Hawke nipped at his tongue, signalling him to get on with it.

Anders reared back. He settled on his legs, Hawke draped over his thighs, and reached down. Hawke’s legs were wide, jostled either side of Anders’s body, and Hawke’s hand helped him push in, wet, swift and secure. Anders wasn’t a small man, and Hawke groaned at the sheer sensation of it, being stretched wide and suddenly full of hard, pulsing, swollen flesh. He loved that moment, that pain and the feeling, knowing someone was hard and hungry for him. He pulled at Anders’s shoulders, raising his hips, letting Anders sink in just a little deeper, make him that much more full.

Hawke grabbed the headboard, anchoring himself. “Fuck me.”

Anders thrust. Again. Once more, and he was unbound, suddenly no room for gentleness as they bucked together in that instinctive rhythm. He was rocking Hawke against the mattress, Hawke was bracing himself, not retreating from Anders’s thrusts, taking their whole power. Hawke writhed as Anders moved in him, making him hurt and loving that, pulling at his own cock in a clumsy, jerking rhythm. He came, wringing and twisting under Anders, sending thick, sticking fluid in curlicues on Ander’s chest. Anders felt Hawke’s whole-body clench, saw the wild ecstasy in his eyes, and suddenly the chained explosion wrenched him deep inside. He went stiffer, swelled against Hawke’s squeeze, and flooded into his partner’s heat.


	3. Chapter 3

Anders woke with familiar weight in his chest. He had done something wrong. There was weight on his chest, too. Hawke was sacked out on top of him. 

That. That was what he had done wrong. Turning to blood magic, even to save _this_ , made his stomach queasy. It wasn’t just the threat of the noose. That sort of magic was evil, he believed that. It was twisting life in ways the Maker never meant. It made him dangerous. He shuddered, half in pleasure, half in disgust, remembering the magic pouring through his veins. He had been outside of himself and he craved it all again, after just a moment’s taste. 

Hawke’s black hair was loose and curtaining his face. Anders brushed it back, revealing the clever brow and the deceptively gentle set of his features in sleep. Tenderness and bloody determination were vying, Justice and his anger pulling for one side, his waking hardness and his hope on the other. 

If he had to fall, let it be for love and the greater cause... and let it stay secret. 

Anders turned his face on the pillow. The handkerchief they had used to clean up was crumpled on the pillowcase beside him, smelling sour, and Anders made a face and pushed it away. 

Hawke stirred as Anders shifted under him, and pinned him with an arm. Anders obediently fell still. He galled a bit at the instinct, at his quick subservience, but the sting of his pride was lost in warmth and the smooth feel of his toes in the sheets and blankets. He held Hawke and let his comfortably empty gaze wander around the room. There was a crack in the heavy stone of the ceiling, an almost invisible furrow that threaded in a near-straight line from near the window, over their heads, toward the center of the room.

Hawke was slowly waking up against his shoulder. Eyes still closed, his hand sank beneath the covers, down their naked bodies, to where they were both half-hard with morning ache. 

Anders pulled in a breath as Hawke stroked them together. Neither were sure what to make of the other at first light. Friends today, or foes? Words were for later, when the world was awake around them. For now it was the two of them, and it was easier to let their bodies do the talking.

Hawke blinked, smiled at Anders, and licked his lips. He ducked to one side, leaning over the edge of the mattress, to where Anders had set the bottle of oil last night. It had fallen over, and a shallow pool of the sweetly-scented stuff was glistening on the floor. He dragged his fingers through it and got his hand around Anders again. 

Hawke was languid, relaxed, and it was the work of a moment for him to climb on top. He leaned in close. “G’morning.”

* * * 

Hawke rolled off of Anders with a groan, onto his side. “Ow,” he said approvingly.

Anders rolled his eyes. 

Hawke twitched his fingers on Anders’s chest. He was silent for a moment. “I think you should...” He had an honest, honestly uncomfortable look on his face. 

“Are you hurting?” Anders sat up, his hand trailing on Hawke’s arm in concern. It was too soon, they shouldn’t have --

“No, I just...” Hawke huffed in irritation. “Feel odd.”

Anders pushed the sheet aside to run his eyes over Hawke’s body. “Lie out, and I’ll check you over.” 

Anders got up and put on the nearest clothing to hand -- Hawke’s tunic -- as Hawke stretched his stiff body out amid the blankets.

Nothing amiss, at Anders’s first glance. Hawke’s heart was beating, his lungs were breathing, and Anders sensed the easy harmony of blood moving about, the synchronized hum of life in good repair. Anders had a skilled craftsman’s pride in his work, and he was satisfied by what he sensed. There was the slightest catch, a stutter in the machine, but Hawke was still healing. He would be back in top form in a day or two. 

His attention moved lower, fingertips ghosting as he examined Hawke’s skin. Anders traced one arm of the stark, V-shaped furrow of Hawke’s pelvis, from his hipbone across his left thigh, to where it tapered into dark hair. He didn’t feel anything amiss. 

“Everything seems well.”

Hawke’s chest rose and fell in a sigh. His stomach fluttered with it. “If you say so.”

Anders was still looking. He could feel echoes of that moment, pushing chaos, when he hadn’t been quite in his own mind. He frowned. 

“Don’t move,” he said. 

Hawke had been levering himself up on one elbow. He froze. 

Anders pushed him gently back down. He spread his palms above Hawke as if warming them over a campfire. A golden light bloomed over Hawke’s skin, falling from Anders’s hands and spreading slowly, like fog rolling down from the mountains. The glow wisped over his flesh, pooling between his legs, in his navel. It was a powerful seeking spell, and Anders tried to hold his hands steady. They were trembling. Something hidden, already so tied to Hawke’s body that it had almost escaped notice. 

The blood was draining from his face. A new place in Hawke, like that place in a woman. Fit for... fit for... 

There was unmistakable potential, too. Fertility, like the tilled earth. He inhaled in a surprised, strangled gasp. His throat stopped up. Andraste’s under-lips, _last night_ , and just now -- 

“What’s wrong?” Hawke asked. Anders had gone white. 

“Nothing.” The words were drowning in his lungs. The shake of his head, the motion of his arms, felt mechanical, as if he were a distant puppet master pulling loose strings, but he managed to raise a reassuring hand. “Nothing.” 

Hawke caught his wrist. “I don’t...”

His smiled while his heart beat in a vice. “Nothing’s wrong.” Once the lies started, the words got easier, they started flowing of their own accord. “Just surprised, that’s all. There was so much damage - the echoes of it all came back, suddenly...” the trump card “... it’s hard to explain.” He rubbed his hands on Hawke’s reddish-brown shirt. Don’t panic. 

Hawke sat up on the edge of the bed. He read the sudden evasion, the unwillingness and the retreat. His eyes narrowed a little. 

Anders managed to meet his look steadily. “You’ll be fine.” 

Hawke stared hard for a moment longer, and then he dropped Anders’s wrist. “All right.”

Anders was still on his feet by sheer will. He watched Hawke get up and walk naked to his wardrobe. 

Surely nothing would come of it. One night was rarely enough, those were only stories they told girls to keep their legs shut. He was a Grey Warden, all the odds were weighed against it. 

His throat was tight, as if he would be sick.

“Where were you yesterday?” Hawke asked, pulling clothes out of his wardrobe. He pulled on a rumpled shirt. 

Anders swallowed. “The clinic.”

“Just the clinic?”

They knew every step he took. Hawke would find the truth easily, if he cared to. 

The best defense was, sometimes, not a lie. 

“I went to the chantry.” That would endear him to Hawke, at least a little. Make some measure of peace between them, enough that Anders could get some distance and _think_.

Hawke turned around at this, looking satisfied. Self-satisfied, almost. “All right,” he said again.

Hawke had some hope in him, too, ever since they had gone to the Deep Roads, and the prison. Anders didn’t remember much of it, only a few brief scenes had survived the tug of war in his brain. He had that _voice_ in his head, and it had been like dying of thirst and hearing a waterfall. Smelling it. Knowing if he just followed the sound, he would be sated. And Hawke had called a break, and stood in front of him:

“I need you to keep it together.” Not a request, an order. 

“I’m _trying_.” Anders’s eyes gleamed with the energy of the it, the half-animal look of a man behind prison bars.

Hawke knew he was fighting, and he respected it. He had no pity for weakness, but someone at the barricades, on the field, in the battle. And there was a part of him, though it was never bared to the light, that couldn’t be cold to Anders’s suffering. 

Anders had his hands clasped desperately to his ears. Hawke placed his own warm hands over them, and put his lips on Anders’s forehead. Blessing him and his fight with his strange, merciless, uncompromising sort of love. 

Anders had grabbed that diamond of a memory and held it tight. When Hawke had bent to kiss him, not as a mage, not as a toy, but as a man. He had offered to study more, when that … thing... had proclaimed itself a magister, proclaimed that the way of the world was more than the chantry’s shell game.

And for a few days after, things had been good. Not for Anders, but for _them_. His promise to study, and his new willingness to look at the Chantry’s teachings, Hawke approved. To him they were cracks in the armor, a way to guide Anders back from his heresy. No question he could beat Anders back into line, but Hawke wasn’t cruel for its own sake. If Anders could be lead peacefully, Hawke would be content. Anders appealed to that small place of softness now.

It seemed to work. “I’m having a bath,” Hawke offered. He was in front of Anders again, a change of his clothes slung over one arm. His free hand reached out for Anders’s naked thigh and brushed invitingly up his hip, under the embroidered hem of the shirt. 

Anders stared dumbly back. There was a tonne-weight of steel in his gut. He was afraid to touch him, speak, as if his breath alone might infect, make life. Maker, if Hawke became... he couldn’t finish the thought. “I’ve just remembered. I have to go out. Back to the clinic. Is that all right?” His gorge rose with every word, he swallowed it back down and hammered out the next. Whoever this sarcastic speaker was, it wasn’t Anders. He was terrified. “Or am I a prisoner again?”

The temperature dropped. Hawke regarded him coldly. “Go play martyr somewhere else.”

He left their room. Anders dressed, and made his escape.

* * *

Hawke sank into the steaming bath. The smell of Anders, all over him, melted away into the hot water. 

How stupid did he Anders think he was? The innocent act, a suddenly-pious apostate going to kneel before chantry wisdom. Hawke shook his head as he rounded the soap in his hands. Anders was a Grey Warden, and the Warden-Commander must have seen something in him, above the usual shiftless, weak run of magekind. But at the bottom of it all, he was as corrupt as any of them. He was a mage with a mage’s compromised soul. Hawke was under no illusions. No one could have a window to the Veil in the very essence of their being and never falter. 

Justice had been Anders’s greatest sin, but the way he was acting this morning filled Hawke with unease. 

Perhaps he had given Anders too much leash. 

The templars certainly thought so. They asked more questions than Hawke answered. Where was he yesterday? Where is he today? Does he get letters? They mistook his silence for ignorance. What went on in Hawke’s home was his business, and his alone. And it was amusing to Hawke, knowing that he was Anders’s keeper and they wouldn’t touch him. But maybe, maybe in playing that satisfying game, he had been distracted from the very real dangers posed by a free - a possessed - mage. 

He had an appointment that afternoon at Templar Hall. He felt up for another training session. Another few drops of lyrium, and that strange, cold power that came with it. 

And when Anders came home tonight, he would be waiting.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Contains discipline and dub-con.

The more steps Anders put between himself and the estate, the clearer his thoughts became. His mind untangled as he moved through bright sunlight, as if he was walking out of his confusion and into clarity. It was always hard for him to think when Hawke was near. Hawke had a strange force around him. It drew people in. It had drawn Anders, like a silly little moth to a bonfire’s wall of flame. Here in the free air, Anders could get his head together. By the time he had reached the steps of Lowtown, he was breathing more easily.

All wasn’t lost. Not yet. Blood magic was a death sentence, no matter whose bed he shared. There was incontrovertible proof written in Hawke’s flesh, but all he had to do was be careful. Much, much more careful than he had been so far. 

What he had done to Hawke... must stay secret. He would find a way to reverse it. There had to be a ritual. And then he would get Hawke to cooperate with a suitable story. He repeated to himself, again, what he knew of the taint. Grey Wardens were known for many feats, but siring whole wallop teams of babes wasn’t among them. He had been corrupted in the blood for a long time. Surely he was a dry spring. 

And if he wasn’t, if the spark of life was still in him, the odds of conceiving after one night were almost nothing. 

He had found his way to the docks. Ships were bobbing in the wharf, and the smell of fish and salt was strong in the air, weaving with the port’s _lingua franca_ : gruff shouting and obscenities. No one paid one lone, pale mage any mind. Everyone had places to be, ropes to sling, fresh sealife to scramble to the markets.

The Gallows stood bluntly in his vision, across the water. He looked away. The Gallows was always _there_ , he felt it like a stone in his boot whether he was looking or not, but he turned his eyes to the ships. Isabela’s face came to him, and he smiled. 

Out in the deep part of the harbor, a massive trading vessel was just getting underway. Her hull was low in the water, laden with cargo bound for far-off coasts. She was large enough to handle the Amaranthine’s open waters. Figures, dark and small at this distance, were flying about in the rigging, rolling out broad, salt-stained sails. Anders recognized the crest of the Dwarven merchants’ guild, a knotted shield of black and gold, emblazoned on the mainsails. The sails hung still for a moment, then swelled as they caught the narrow wind that funneled through the cliffs of Kirkwall, and suddenly she was off. She broke out of the shadow of the Gallows, into the light, and the gold thread of the crest gleamed. 

He guessed at the giddy sense of freedom that must embrace you, leaving Kirkwall. The horizon opening up in front, the statues of twisted despair falling away behind. Even if you didn’t have far to go, even if this was the only home you had ever known, leaving the city’s shadow must be a weight off the heart. 

Had he really been here ten years? 

The ship was turning out of sight into the cliff-walled passage, toward liberty. And he reminded himself that it was an illusion. There was no freedom for him or his kind, in Kirkwall or anywhere else. It had to be made, and it would start here. 

His goal wasn’t yet lost. 

He was calmer, though not peaceful. There was a vice on his temples, new paranoia had taken root. But his conscience - at odds with Justice’s indictment - granted him clemency. He hadn’t meant for this to happen. If he was slow and careful, they would go on as they had been. No need to upset Hawke. No need to involve him at all. One more secret wouldn’t break what had never been whole.

* * *  


Hawke was fresh from Templar Hall, excited by the chilly vibration in his blood. The lyrium made him feel full of vague need, like those earliest, childish kindlings of desire. It sent him back, to a child of ten or eleven. He used to open his buttons and free himself at night, in the dark, cold air, and let the room breath over him. With Carver sleeping at his elbow, hogging the blankets, Hawke would lie very still and feel the caress of the night. Wanting something. 

He was a grown man, now, and he was very sure what.

He prowled the Hightown estate, waiting for Anders as the sun set. Bodahn kept Sandal carefully out of his way, recognizing that the master of the house was in no mood, and shuffled the young man off to their living quarters the moment their day’s duties were finished. 

Anders returned soon afterward. He entered the house quietly, and detoured to drop off some new toys he had picked up for Sandal. “Toys”. They were rare ingredients, not usually in circulation, that a friend had smuggled out of the Circle. A few jagged hunks of pink, powdery stone, and spindly crystals of luminescent blue. It wasn’t all fond altruism; he was fascinated to see what new terrors Sandal would unleash on the neighborhood cats, and it wasn’t safe to keep them at his clinic any longer. They might draw questions. 

He had spent a good part of the day purging the clinic of anything incriminating. In the normal course, he didn’t leave parchment around with secretly subversive plans written in huge letters. Nothing screamed _please arrest me, templar sers_ , but now the stakes were higher. He had to be _careful_.

Hawke was tipping things from the correspondence table into the waste basket when Anders walked in. Invitations, mostly unopened, their thick, waxy seals still intact, receipts, bills from tradesmen. He let Anders cross the room and listened to him move things about on Sandal’s workbench, waiting for Anders to speak. 

Anders seemed intent on ignoring him, back turned on Hawke, carefully replacing things in Sandal’s trunk. Hawke said his name. 

Anders paused and raised his head, indicating he had heard.

“You took your time,” Hawke said, throwing down the gauntlet. 

“I had things to do.” No apology. Renewed determination, and the undercurrent of fear in every thought, saw to that. 

Hawke glanced at the night sky beyond the high windows. “I’ve been waiting.” 

The storm was about to make landfall. Their skin was prickling with the electricity of it, the brewing energy in the estate’s quietly dark hall.  
*****  
Anders closed Sandal’s chest with a loud crack. “Lock me out, if I’m not home soon enough for your liking.” 

Hawke snorted. “Don’t come home, if it’s not to _your_ liking.” 

Such generosity. He rapped his fingertips on the chest of enchanting apparatus, scowling. Then he faced Hawke. “I’ve got nowhere else to go. You and the Knight-Commander have seen to that.” 

“You don’t seem to mind very much. Staying in my house, on my coin.” Hawke was slowly pacing closer, and Anders was coiling in on himself, still standing at the workbench. 

Of all the things between them, Anders asked himself desperately, why fight about money? It was like Hawke, to lock them in an arena over something so petty, just to enrage him. And it was working. He balled his fist against his leg, trying to keep hold of himself. 

“I’ve never forgotten for an instant that this is all _yours_. I’ve never...” He had never taken advantage. He had never let Hawke buy him anything -- a shirt or two, perhaps, but... but he had never been dishonest about a single copper. He was many things, but he was no thief. 

Hawke was in front of him now, leaning in. Anders refused to give ground.

“But you had no trouble using my sovereigns to fund that clinic of yours -- if that’s where the money really went.” 

He had spent several dozen sovereigns. Some of it even on the clinic. Most had gone to his associates, or toward greasing palms, and the rest had been a fund, trickled out to newly-freed mages who needed money to stay ahead of the templars. 

But he hadn’t taken it under a false pretense. “You told me that was _mine_. My share of the expedition.”

“All right,” Hawke said, as if he didn’t _quite_ remember it that way.

Anders was helpless. He couldn’t give the money back. He would, just to throw it in Hawke’s face, but it was all gone years ago, and Hawke’s awful smirk was burning Anders away inside. “Why do you do this?” he asked. _Why am I still here_. “Sometimes you say things that give me hope, and then -- then I can’t believe you’re the same person, or that I could be such a fool.” 

“Just trying to clear the air,” Hawke said, smiling thinly.

Anders glared daggers.

Hawke reached past him and secured the locks on Sandal’s chest. His arm brushed Anders’s, where it was rigid against his body with his hand still clenched. “Let’s not fight.” 

Anders, upset as only Hawke could make him -- gored pride and Justice raging inside -- had a stab of gratitude. It was that same stupid thankfulness that had plagued him in solitary confinement, when he had been happy to see a templar eye at the cell’s keyhole. It wasn’t healthy. It wasn’t love. 

But it was there. This insane, gnawing _want_. For someone he hated. 

His hands slowly unclenched. Sometimes he wondered if Hawke wound him up just to talk him down. If this was some mad game. He knew Anders didn’t mind their knock-down drag-outs about the big things, their clashing ideals and political crusades. Those things were combat, heated blood, debate mixed with a need to conquer, and they were evenly matched. These small things, though, these little reminders that Hawke held all the real power here... he used them to make Anders unhappy and bruised, and then held out a soothing hand. 

“Come to bed, if you want to.” Hawke turned on his heel and he climbed the stairs. 

And Anders was always stupid enough to take it. Anders snarled at Justice to shut up, and followed. 

* * *

In the bedroom, Hawke had oil warming over a candle, in a small pot on the room’s corner table. It had a thick smell, like the holy hypocrisy of the chantry’s incense. Anders breathed lightly as he pulled off his grey coat and leggings. Before he could get to his socks and long shirt, Hawke came up behind. He put his hands on Anders’s shoulder blades. Anders stood still as Hawke smoothed over his tense shoulders, grasped them, and turned him around. 

There was no dignity in acquiescing, getting undressed and hard, but he was helpless when Hawke’s deep eyes invited him. Justice had kept him in a saintly, sexless purgatory for three dead years. The loneliness of it was still with him, it had seeped into the cracks in his soul made by the Circle. Yes, the Circle -- he had resisted them until the end, but he hadn’t escaped unscathed. No one did. 

So maybe there was no dignity in this. He didn’t care. He needed it. 

Hawke took Anders’s face, dragging the rough pad of his thumb over his lips and the short, wire-like shadow of stubble. Anders turned into the touch, reaching up to guide Hawke’s hand to his mouth. He trailed kisses on Hawke’s fingers, the sun-darkened knuckles, across the calloused palm and underside of his wist. He was trying to think, even as Hawke got his other hand around the back of Anders’s head and brought them together. Hawke kissed like he lived: full-force. The press of his mouth made Anders tingle, sent tiny slivers of pain down his chin. Hawke’s hands grasped his hips, reached around him, and he drew their bodies tight. 

Should he stop them? He should. But he didn’t want to, not with Hawke’s hands squeezing him, and his cock straining, trying to rise against Hawke’s close body. 

Dangerous, his brain reminded. _Careful_.

Just don’t take him. Simple. 

Hawke was grinding against his pelvis eagerly. Scraps of sensible thought struggled to be heard over the heaviness between his legs and all of his focus rushing to his skin, the hot places where Hawke’s palms were holding him, and Hawke’s sucking bites against his neck. Hawke nuzzled his nose into the collar of Anders’s shirt, scraping the line of his shoulder with the edges of his teeth, and Anders grasped him.

Hawke put his forehead against Anders’s, bone against bone. He always liked to look at the flush on Anders’s face. His fringe of beard feathered over Anders’s lips, and Anders groaned. He’d need a sheath, or one of the potions they poured down the apprentices’ throats in the Circle. For now...

“Have me,” Anders said softly, and he watched Hawke’s eyes darken.

Hawke’s gaze flicked to the table. “Over here.” 

Anders followed. He pulled off his shirt as he went and left it trailed across the floor. He reached the table and Hawke nodded to him. Anders put his hands flat on the tabletop and looked at the small, flickering flame. 

Hawke’s fingers dipped into the little pot of oil, tested the temperature, and looked appreciatively at Anders, bent over in front of him. The two stunted wings of his shoulder blades, the scatter of freckles across his shoulders and grooves of his ribs. The channel of his spine, bowing into narrow cheeks. Hawke let a few drops of the oil fall at the nape of Anders’s neck, below the rough chop of his sandy-blond hair, and slid a finger down Anders’s spine, watching the muscles roll and tense with his fingertip. He left a heated trail down to the crease of his arse, and ran his fingers along the furrow. 

Anders shuddered and spread his feet wider. Hawke’s left hand was gripping his bicep, and he saw Hawke’s hand glide to the oil again, re-wetting his fingers. Anders closed his eyes and leaned on the hardness of the table as Hawke touched his opening and teased the oil around. It was comfortable on his back, but almost too hot on this sensitive place, and the flame of the candle wavered and danced as Anders’s breathing got harsher. 

“Too much?” Hawke asked

“No.”  
*****

Hawke slipped one fingertip in, hooking gently at the strong elastic ring and turning his finger this way and that, stretching him. Anders tried to relax, helped by Hawke’s other hand moving slowly over the rises of his vertebrae. It set his spine on fire, and Hawke’s touch skirted his hip. Hawke followed the light trail of hair down his fluttering stomach to the thicker curls beneath, surrounded Anders with a fist, and pulled. Anders’s hips bucked into that solid warmth, slicked with a little oil. Hawke squeezed as Anders jerked into his hand, and took that moment to push in his second finger, as Anders rocked back against him. The intrusion caught Anders off guard, stopped him mid-thrust as he got used to the new stretching, the new size inside. 

Hawke was leaning over him to kiss and blow on his neck, and his fist uncurled from Anders and cupped his heavy balls. Hawke rolled them with gentle pressure, a light crush and pull. His fingers were still inside, scissoring. Big. Pressing against that place that made his hips twitch, his balls draw up tight. He gasped as Hawke rubbed him base to tip again. A drop of pre-cum fell to the table. “Please.” 

“Like this.” Hawke guided his hands forward, pushed him down so his chest was almost against the wooden tabletop, bent almost double. 

Anders heard Hawke disrobing, the soft, rustling sounds of cloth leaving skin and falling to the floor. He straightened up to follow him, but Hawke’s hand landed firmly on his shoulder. Hawke leaned over his back and pinched a soft earlobe between his teeth. “Stay there.”

Anders trembled from the cooling oil on his skin, the chill in the room, left bent over and naked. He had a second to wonder where Hawke’s hands had gone, when a sharp slap landed on his hindquarters. He jumped, but Hawke’s forearm was suddenly clamped over his shoulders, holding him down. “What are you --” It stung like a templar’s whip. The sharp crack of it rang in his ears as the piercing needles faded and his backside started to burn.

Hawke’s humid breath swirled against his ear. “The templars think I’m too lenient. Am I?” 

“I --” Anders startled again as Hawke gave him another hard swat, a quick lash with the wide palm of his hand across his already-stinging cheeks. He struggled against Hawke, the arm holding him down, and Hawke clicked his tongue. He slapped Anders again, Anders bucked, and Hawke retaliated with another whip. “Am I too lenient.”

“ _No_.” It should have been humiliating. His naked butt in the air, Hawke treating him like a child. But he was still full-hard, tight and hot in the pit of his stomach, and Hawke was still close to him, naked and warm. 

“You’re going to behave?”

In that moment, from some twisted labyrinth deep down inside him, the answer was “ _Yes_.”

Hawke looked down at the thin, pale curves, the angry red welts across them. He gave one last smack, and heard Anders cry out under him. He ducked his arm around Anders, found his heavy length, pumped it once, twice, and Anders convulsed and almost shrieked as he came. 

Anders let his head fall on his arms, running with sweat, the after-tremors wringing a few last drops from his core. The hot pain still radiating, and Hawke rubbing him down like a freshly-broken horse. 

Hawke’s lips were at his ear again. “Bed.”

Anders didn’t know if he could stand. He pulled his elbows under himself. He turned unsteadily, and finally saw Hawke’s face. 

Dark brown eyes, sweeping his. He seemed... not softer. He was never soft. But more open, more interested than usual. “Okay?” Hawke asked.

Anders choked on a sudden urge to cry, and managed a shaky smile. _Maker_.  
*****

They went to the bed. Anders arranged the pillows, himself, and Hawke settled over him. Hawke’s fingers tested him once more, and then Anders felt his tip, blunt, oiled, and heated by pulsing blood, at his entrance. He tried to relax as Hawke’s rough hands lifted his aching flesh. Hawke nudged in, firm and slow. 

Anders was still out of his head, out of his body, enjoying Hawke’s thickness moving inside. He stared past Hawke’s shoulder, eyes focused on nothing. Hawke was kissing him, using his callous hand to chafe at a hardening nipple, then up to the soft, vulnerable lines of Anders’s throat. His fingers sank in, and Anders’s eyes shot to him in sudden fear -- and then Hawke jerked his head, closed his eyes, and Anders tried to yell as they were enveloped in ice. No sound, no motion, just a soul-deep freeze as his every sense was numbed and they hung there together in a coldness and silence like death.

Hawke was staring at him. No more curiosity, just unfathomable calculation. 

Anders tried to move, couldn’t. Hawke had taken a breathing, living part of him and torn it away, leaving something colder than ice in its place. Anders’s whole bare body convulsed and he wanted to scream. Hawke was inside, pinning him, and his hand squeezed Anders’s throat. He wasn’t moving, just big and hard, making Anders feel him even as he struggled weakly. 

Hawke let him breathe again, and Anders pulled in a breath, more of a sob, as Hawke stared down at him. He felt the tears prickling, and bit them back. He shoved at Hawke, who held fast.

“I won’t forget this. I’ll --”

Hawke grabbed Anders’s hand and forced it to his chest. His heart was thudding away, not too fast, not too slow. Anders couldn’t draw his palm away, it was held there like magnetism. He clenched his fingers, digging his nails into Hawke’s dark chest hair and the flesh beneath.

Hawke looked down to Anders’s digging grip, right over his heart. “You’d tear it out if you could.”

Anders didn’t deny it. 

Hawke pressed his hips forward, and Anders sobbed aloud. 

“None of that.” Hawke easily took Anders’s hand away from his chest and laid it on the pillow beside Anders’s head. “You have to trust me.”

“Trust you. _Trust you_.” Anders tried to squirm free, but his body still wasn’t his. His teeth were chattering and he felt like a broken thing, in angry tears, lying in pieces on the mattress. “Let me _go_.”

“Not yet.” Hawke kissed him again, nothing but gentle, as Anders shuddered. 

“ _Please_.”

Hawke nestled his face against Anders’s slamming carotid artery, draped over him. “When you understand.” He bit at Anders’s jaw. “I love you.” Bite. “And I’ll never hurt you.”

And with that, Anders was free. Sound rushed back into his ears. The feel of Hawke’s body, his own soreness, the taste of his salty tears.

Anders blinked furiously. “You fucking --” 

Hawke thrust in him, building a rhythm. The sweat broke out on him and Anders clasped his arms around Hawke’s back, clenching his fingers into Hawke’s flesh and still half weeping, as Hawke groaned and panted against his hair. Maker, Maker, _why_. Why was his soul’s instinct to _cling_ to this man who made him hate, made everything in him sick with rage? What was this?

It was hell. It was love. And it was part of who and what he was, like the heart that beat in him.


	5. Chapter 5

The next morning, Hawke rolled over and apologized. Anders heard himself pause and, finally, forgive. Someone outside of them might mistake that for capitulation, but forgiveness wasn’t surrender. He had enough spirit to make sure of that. The contest would go on. Anders had gotten the worst of it last night, but Hawke would take his turn, and they both knew it. 

It wasn’t deliberate vengeance that Anders was after. The love that lurked among the monsters wouldn’t allow that. It was simply the violence at their core, irreconcilables and soul-seated antipoles that chafed against one another. The friction of it built up beneath until it exploded. 

Both were resigned and willing to suffer, because not suffering it would be worse. To settle the contest once and for all would leave life emptier. More restful, maybe, but when they exhausted themselves doing battle, they could fall into each other without having to think too hard about it. If all was calm, the sun in the clear sky might reveal some troubling facts to both of them. No two people in love -- or hate -- were ever eager see each other cast in perfect, disinterested light. 

Anders didn’t go to the chantry the next day, or the next. He slept beside Hawke, woke beside him, made love with him, for a week. Then two, and then three. He was still seeking help reversing his mistake, but with every day that passed, his fear lost some of its biting hold. No signs of anything amiss in his lover. There were the usual scrapes and bruises -- all right, stab wounds and broken bones -- occupational hazards that came with being the city’s heroic dogsbody, but Hawke was otherwise the picture of health. 

 

Three almost-peaceful weeks later. Hawke hadn’t been sleeping well the last few days. Vivid dreams, so intense that during the day he sometimes stopped and had to carefully sort them out from real memories. 

Anders was lying in the covers beside Hawke, fit to him, his head heavy on Hawke’s shoulder, and one hand up inside Hawke’s shirt for warmth and to feel his heartbeat. It was peculiarly Anders, the closeness, the thin hand resting half-curled on his chest. One of the clingiest people Hawke had ever gone to bed with. He always tried to tangle himself with you, as if to keep you beside him, afraid you’d disappear. 

Hawke felt the irritating press of a full bladder, and had to abandon his musings. He slid out of bed. Anders flopped sleepily into the warm hollow that he left behind. He went to the chamber pot a few paces away, came back.

When he returned to bed, Anders’s eyes were open in the dark, watching him. 

“Sorry.” Hawke jostled Anders over, burrowing down beside him again. Settled, he slung an arm over Anders. “Going to have to stop drinking after dinner.”

Hawke’s arm was warm and heavy across his chest, and Anders encircled the strong, sinewy wrist with his hand. Hawke’s tossing and turning, the need to get up and answer nature’s call... Anders had been watching Hawke like the proverbial for any slightest sign, and these flashed ominously, like an approaching storm. 

He was suddenly wide awake, and was rubbing a quick, nervous circle with his thumb on the knob of Hawke’s wrist. Hawke grunted -- Anders had set and healed the wrist just a few days ago, courtesy of a dwarf with the very heavy war axe. 

“I’m sorry.” 

Hawke ignored him and rolled over, putting his broad back to Anders. Anders took a deep breath. 

Yes? No? 

Yes. Of course, yes. He knew.

It was too early for sure-spells, the kind he cast when nervous young girls and hopeful old wives came to his clinic. But he knew. 

His heart was pounding and the fear, dammed up for the last few weeks, emptied back into his blood. His head filled with a frantic buzzing and there was a sharp, crinkling ache in his chest. 

*****

He got up. He felt dizzy. Hawke ignored him, fast asleep, as Anders went into the dark hallway and felt for the hanging lantern. He lit it with a twist of hand and made for the library.

He didn’t bother lighting the fire. He got his books, brought them into the lantern’s weak, soft light, and paged through them all again. Useless, every single one of them. And now -- he realized with a start -- it didn’t matter. It was too late. 

Cold hours went by as he sat at the desk and thought. 

He had brought a death sentence on both their heads. But he had died many deaths. The first had been at his father’s hand, when he was barely more than a child. The fear and hate in his father’s eyes, the betrayal, the murder of realizing everything he knew was a lie. 

Justice had been another death, more complete. 

Another, not long after. He had seen the woman, heavy and surely near her time, as she climbed down into the boat bound for Kirkwall. He suspected she would need him before the crossing was done, and he hadn’t been wrong. 

Her husband had been terrified. A young man, fleeing the ashes of the farm his family had tilled for generations. Anders had watched his rough hands hold on to hers as she suffered.

When it was done, he had leaned over his exhausted wife and their baby. “I love you.” She lit up, suddenly so strong despite it all -- and reached up to wipe at his tears. 

That was the moment the old Anders, any trace of his flippancy, any detachment, any numbness to the pain and grief and _beauty_ of it, this moment of light between birth and darkness, had finally been cast aside. 

And the realization that followed so fast on its heels: he would never know their joy. These two people had nothing, the ash of their home was still in their hair, but in an instant, delivered from blood and pain, there had been a tomorrow. New hope and new life. 

The Grey Wardens didn’t exactly advertise the Joining’s side-effects on the recruitment posters. He hadn’t been phased when he found out. It was hard to imagine, but he had been _young_ , and never given it a thought. On the boat to Kirkwall, seeing a new mother holding her baby to her, the blazing love in daddy’s eyes, Anders realized what he had lost, and mourned. 

Now... He was scared, but half of him was mad with joy. He was a father. The Circle’s refrain was in his ears: mages were dirty. Cursed. Anything that came of them would be rotten. 

He would prove them wrong. His child would be beautiful. His and Hawke’s child. And Hawke would finally see and understand. Hawke might half-hate him, might be pitiless about his sister... but he would hear their child’s first cries. He couldn’t live that moment and stay unmoved.

Anders would see him through. He wasn’t sure how, yet -- but it would come clear. They had time. 

He rubbed his eyes, suddenly exhausted. Dawn was grey in the windows. Anders rose, ignoring the creak of his cold, stiff joints. Bodahn would be up soon, and Anders didn’t want to be found in the library. He was a polite and genial dwarf. He’d be all smiles. “Breakfast, Master Anders?” He probably reported to the templars with that same fawning gawp. 

Anders closed the library door behind him and hurried back up the stairs.


	6. Chapter Six

Chapter Six  
Some set-up, starring Ser Cullen.

* * *

Armed with this new hope, a new responsibility, and a heavy secret, the next two weeks crawled for Anders. Was it cowardice that kept his secret so tightly locked inside? No. It was hope. Soon they’d reach the point of no return. But he had to be _sure_. This was the delicate time, and he watched Hawke closely. He worried over Hawke, prayed for them, kept vigil while he slept, sometimes all night, listening to Hawke’s every breath and sigh, and his own heart thudding. 

Hawke was napping, now, in the middle of the afternoon. After a morning of sitting on committees, interviews with a score of his business managers (all thin, severe, law-versed little men, like emaciated dwarves, looking like they’d just crawled out of dusty holes), he had crawled into bed and was dead to the world. Anders was at the table in the corner of their bedroom, looking up every time Hawke’s foot twitched in the sheets or his breathing changed. For the last two hours Hawke had been fast asleep, hugging a pillow, while Anders worked quietly at the table. 

There was a calendar in front of him, plotted out by his hand. Not that he had much use for calendars. He lived on Hawke’s whim, following when he was needed, and doing whatever he could on the side. Very little, with Meredith ascendant and Hawke suspicious. He was tracing the month’s dates with the splintered tip of his feather quill, catching it here and there on the rough paper, as he counted backwards. Nothing had come to a crisis, and by Anders’s count, the most dangerous time was almost over. They were nearing the two month mark. 

He’d have to tell Hawke, pretty bloody soon. The feather pen was shaking in his hand, and he set it carefully down in the crease of the pages. First he needed a drink.

Anders stood and went to the bed. He put one hand on the mattress and leaned over Hawke’s sleeping form, almost kissing his black hair, which was a little disheveled, strands of it escaping the braid. “I’m going out for a bit.” 

No reply. A gentle snore. Anders was overwhelmed with the desire to just _touch_ him -- and did, putting his thin hand on Hawke’s heavy shoulders, warm through the light grey material of his under shirt. Hawke turned his head, half-waking, and Anders touched him reassuringly, stroking him like a beloved mabari, down the curve of his back. Powerful man. Vulnerable. Even if he didn’t know it yet. 

“Back soon,” Anders promised quietly. 

* * *

Anders stepped inside the Hanging Man, moving from breezy air to the smoky, steaming kettle of Lowtown’s busiest, shadiest watering hole. The pub always smelled of sawdust and fermenting yeast, grease and pan-searing food from the kitchens, and the undercurrent of rust and blood. It was packed at this hour, with workmen from the docks switching shifts and crowding in, filling up the tables with jostling elbows and empty mugs, crumbs, gravy-smeared spoons and plates. Anders wove through the shifting, living crowd and climbed the few steps to Varric’s suite. 

He stopped short of the door, in the dusty hallway, as he caught sight of the silver-white, sharp-eared companion at Varric’s side, basking in the firelight. Varric was presiding at the head of the table, in his stout chair that was more a throne. Aveline was across from Fenris, on Varric’s left, face glowing slightly with drink and her hair brilliant red in the fire’s light. A waitress was clearing the table. The conversation faltered as they saw him, and Anders’s shoulders bunched tight. He almost went away, but Varric waved, ordering him in with a firm, friendly smile.

“And one for him,” Varric said to the serving girl, who was making another round of the table, piling empty glasses and dishes from their dinner onto her tray. She eyed Anders, added him to the tab running in her head, and swept past him into the din of the main room, balancing the wide tray and its load of dishware close to her body. 

Anders shook his head, careful not to look at Fenris. “Thank you, but I’ll go.”

“Shut up,” Varric said cheerfully. “Have a drink.”

“If he doesn’t want to,” Fenris said, with a note of good riddance. He had pulled himself upright when he saw Anders, instantly more hunched and guarded, green eyes giving Anders little pierces of dislike. 

“Sit down with us,” Aveline invited. 

Two out of three. Anders shrugged. He avoided Fenris’s look as he folded himself down to Varric’s table. It wasn’t a table made to accommodate human knees -- it _could_ , but it was far from good-spirited about it. He got comfortable, and Aveline raised her mostly-empty drink to him in sympathy. 

“What have you been up to?” she asked, slightly drunk, and yet somehow still sounding exactly like the Captain of the Guard. 

Anders just smiled.

“He’s a man of mystery,” Varric said, angling them away from a makeshift interrogation.

“He’s a mage,” Fenris cut in, as if that explained it all. 

Anders looked at Fenris and the slightest hint of flush on his silver-pale cheekbones. Not so moody when he was drunk: just mean. At least where Anders was concerned.

Aveline was still present enough to be embarrassed, and turned back to her glass, pretending she hadn’t heard. 

Varric grinned at them all before the silence could fully settle. “Isn’t this fun. What do you need, Blondie?”

“Just looking in. I didn’t know you were busy.” He hadn’t been around in a long while, and seeing this bright camaraderie between his companions -- he realized that had missed out on it. Long years of orbiting around Hawke had bound them together, like accretion, while he went his solitary path. Tonight they had genuinely been enjoying each other’s company, and he had come in like a sudden, cold draft. When, he tried to remember, had anyone ever been glad to see him? Anders sat quietly, hands in his lap, knocking his knees against the underside of the table. 

The waitress came back, a drink was put in front of him, and he nursed it as he listened to Varric try to pick the conversation up again. He managed it, managed even to get Fenris to lighten up. 

The dark Orzammar ale Varric had carted up to the surface by the barrel-full seemed to loosen his joints and enlarge the space behind his eyes, and Anders traced the in-laid, blocky pattern of the table with a fingertip as he listened to the chatter. He hadn’t come for any particular reason. Mostly just to speak to someone who wasn’t Hawke. He sat silently among them, though, and no one badgered him. He drifted away from the conversation, into his own thoughts. 

He had to tell Hawke. And Hawke might just kill him. 

He had come to the Hanging Man for a taste of life, he realized, because he would have to break the news very soon -- and he had thought he would miss this. Being around Varric’s table, stories, smiles. But he hadn’t realized how far he had grown from all of them. Even Varric, who was laughing with Aveline and seemed to have forgotten Anders was there. Meredith’s crushing grip on the city, his singular fight, and the strange prison he inhabited with Hawke -- all of that had slowly set him adrift from his former friends. This latest secret was the death knell. He couldn’t feel anything for them anymore. They were too far away. 

He looked down at his hand on the familiar tabletop. He wouldn’t be missed by them, either. He had no connection to them any more. No connection to anyone. He was alone, except for... His only hope, and greatest fear. Hawke himself. 

He stood up. “Good-bye,” he announced. He meant it.

Varric’s friendly eyes met his, a little apologetically, even as he kept encouraging Aveline in her latest story. She was giggling, ignoring Anders. Fenris didn’t look up. 

Anders took his leave. Back to Hawke. 

* * *

A politely insistent knock was sounding on the thick bedroom door. Hawke, hair askew, picked his face up off the pillow. More knocking. He rolled over, and realized with a start that the day was almost gone. The room was in twilight, and the light from outside was weakly golden. Sunset. 

How long had he slept? This was getting ridiculous. He pushed himself up -- and caught himself quickly with his hands. A little dizzy. He focused on the knocking through the slight ring in his hears, until it passed. 

Bodahn was at the door. “Serrah. Sorry to wake you, but Ser Cullen is here.” 

“Have him sit a minute.” Hawke couldn’t meet the templar in his smallclothes. “Put him in the library. I’ll be right down.”

Hawke shut the door again. Caught napping. It embarrassed him in a way he couldn’t explain, even to himself. There was something... pathetic about it, sleeping half the day away. He pulled on thick, dark socks, and headed for the armory. He’d make a good impression on the Knight-Captain, at least. 

In front of the large mirror in the armory, he settled the thick, heavy metal of his chest piece over his square shoulders. It sat wrong around him. He started to secure the straps, yanking them as tight as he could make them. He wrenched on the belt, trying to get the tooth of the buckle into one of the holes punched through the leather, and swore. He’d let it out three notches in the last fortnight. His training was as robust as usual. He came back _tired_. It must be doing him good, but his ill-fitting armor told a different story. 

And Anders, skittering around like a man with a secret. Staring at him when he thought Hawke wouldn’t notice. Hawke’s face was hard. 

He let the buckle out another notch, secured it, and looked at himself in the mirror. He felt all right, if he could just shake the Maker-cursed tiredness. The occasional bout of dizziness when he got to his feet too quickly. No fever. He shook his head, dispelling his worries for now, and went downstairs to meet Ser Cullen. 

* * * 

Hawke opened the library door. Some of Anders’s books were in a cluttered pile, a few lay temptingly open on the desk. The templar was too proper to be caught snooping, however. He was standing in front of the fireplace, hands clasped behind his back. He wasn’t at attention, but Hawke had never seen him really relaxed. He wasn’t wearing his armor, instead, he was in the off-duty garb of the templars: a long-sleeved, silvery blue over-robe, secured at the waist with a muted red sash, plain, dark boots, and similar leggings. He didn’t look much smaller without the armor on. Square-jawed, broad shoulders. He had a bag over his shoulder. 

“Champion. The Knight-Commander sends her compliments.”

“It’s an unusual hour for business, isn’t it, Cullen?” Hawke asked. 

Cullen shook his hands out from behind his back. His heavy brow furrowed. “Yes. Champion; I won’t waste your time. I haven’t come from the Knight-Commander.”

Hawke raised his eyebrows. “All right. What can I do for you?”

“Your friend...” 

Hawke stiffened. “What about him.”

“Not him, Ser Hawke. The Captain of the Guard.” 

Hawke hid the relief on his face by turning to the desk, making a show of rifling through a few of the papers there. “Ah. Aveline. What worries can the Templar Order have about the finest of our city’s finest?” 

Cullen squared his shoulders, signaling his official disapproval. “She’s been keeping back reports on some of the apostates in the city. Our man in --” Cullen stopped himself. This was the Champion of Kirkwall, but he wasn’t party to everything happening in the city. He went on, still addressing Hawke’s back, “I enjoy working with Captain Hendyr, and I’d hate for the Knight-Commander to feel... threatened.”

Hawke had run his eyes over most of Anders’s writing, skimming. It was the usual nonsense. He turned back to Cullen. “This is something you should take up with Aveline, surely. Yourself.”

“I’m not in a position to do so,” Cullen said bluntly. He was close to the Knight-Commander, it was true, but she had started seeing treachery in her soup spoon. None of them were above suspicion. He could get away with a visit to the Champion. The Captain of the Guard, already under watch? No.

“Among the papers that finally came to light, it seems that Captain Hendyr had a host of reports from concerned citizens about your own apostate.” Cullen removed the bag from his shoulder and drew a small sheaf of papers from it. He held up the loosely-bound stack. “They go back... some time, but more troubling is the recent spate. Ser Hawke, if the Knight-Commander sees these, she will take action. He’s been visible too long.” 

Cullen licked his lips, nervous under Hawke’s suddenly intense stare. He could see ahead, the house of cards that was Kirkwall, and the disaster it would be when it all came down. Meredith and Orsino were already tottering on their foundations, and angering the Champion wouldn’t help. He asked carefully, “Is the apostate up to something?”

The fire was flickering behind Ser Cullen, drawing Hawke’s eyes as a thousand little worries, and his anger, flared. 

He pulled his gaze back to Cullen’s face. “Nothing new.” Hawke smiled with practiced, mechanical ease. “He’s been an annoying little pebble in your boots for years, but when all is said and done, he’s mostly harmless.”

“You’re certain.” Cullen wouldn’t gamble on an apostate, but with the Champion’s smiling assurance, he found some space to breathe. 

“Certain,” Hawke repeated. “He’s on his best behavior. He promised me.” He was still smiling. Inside, he was cold with fury. 

Cullen held the papers out. “Then take these. Do what you like with them.” 

Hawke looked at the papers and back at Cullen, and the bead of sweat trickling from his short-cropped hairline. He held out his hand, and Cullen, after another hesitant breath, quickly crossed the room and shoved them into Hawke’s waiting fingers. 

Cullen retreated. There was a viper twisting in his guts. This was stepping outside his duty’s bounds, active treachery, but he wouldn’t let everything fall on their heads. Not while he could help it -- and wasn’t that his highest duty? To protect. He held on to that ideal, even if Meredith’s demands of duty were almost unrecognizable. Terrorizing and breaking. Things he remembered from _that time_ , suspended in that prison. The fear he had known, reflected back at him from every mage under their charge. 

They had all lost their way. But it could be so much worse. The Champion, his apostate -- they made Cullen’s skin crawl. He sensed something as dangerous as the mad glint in Meredith’s eyes, or the fury in Orsino’s reedy body. _Maker, let me be doing right._ “You’ll have a word with Captain Hendyr.”

“I will.”

“Good night, Champion.” Cullen’s voice wasn’t steady. 

“Good night, Ser Cullen.”

* * *   
Anders tested the estate’s front door and found it open. The hair rose on his arms as he entered the front hall. It was quiet. Bodahn and Sandal would be off duty, but the silence was something heavier. Even the fire seemed muted, flashing in its grate almost noiselessly. 

The library door opened. 

Templar and apostate, a glance of recognition and fear across the gulf, and then Anders was swept up in that visceral, instant, spine-wrenching hate. He wouldn’t be taken. Not now. There was hope on the horizon at last, and Hawke _needed_ him -- 

“Ser Cullen was just leaving,” Hawke said loudly, crashing through Justice’s frightened roar. Anders’s gaze snapped to him, then back to the templar. He hadn’t drawn his sword. He wasn’t wearing armor. Anders looked at Hawke again. 

Bodahn appeared, as was the way with servants. Invisible during ugly scenes, but on hand to usher out the survivors when they were through. He skirted Anders apologetically, bowed to Ser Cullen, and showed him to the door. 

Anders turned slowly as they passed by him, watched every step the templar took toward the front door, and kept watching as Bodahn bolt it behind him. He heard Hawke’s voice from the stairs: “Come with me.”


	7. Chapter 7

Upstairs, Hawke stood with a hand on the heavy bedroom door, bracing it open, and beckoned Anders inside with the few papers he was holding. The fear in Anders reached a crescendo as he stepped under Hawke’s arm and felt hot breath on his cheek. He squared his shoulders and faced Hawke as the door closed behind them.

“I don’t like them here,” Anders said, still quick-pulsed from coming face to face with the Knight-Captain. 

Hawke’s armor gleamed in the torchlight. He raised one dark, thick, sardonic eyebrow. “If you knew what grand gifts they bring me, you might change your mind.”

Anders inhaled deeply. It was a fight he wouldn’t win. He paced over toward the bed, turned, and took a resigned swipe at the bait. “What did he want.”

“He wanted to ask me about you.”

That was surprisingly honest. Anders gave Hawke a slow, questioning look, his eyebrows furrowing.

Hawke came closer, flicking the papers. “He gave me these. You’re not as discrete as you think. You should be more careful.” The pages were scrawled over with spotty, inky writing, and Anders stared at them as Hawke went on, “There’s enough here to bring the templars down on you. Is that what you want?”

“No.” That, at least, was the truth. 

“Tell me what’s going on. I can help you.”

Anders was silent. The white knight that lurked in Hawke’s soul wasn’t new. He was a figure Anders had confronted before. Every gentle touch, every word that comforted him, soothed him, was somehow his. Like Anders, containing Vengeance and his rage, Hawke had another side, was another person. Maker, they were a mess.

Hawke tried again. “Anders, it’s me.”

Anders snorted, a rasp of disbelief, as he shook his head. Two people, but Anders knew very well the one he usually dealt with. “What does that _mean_? ‘You’? After all you’ve done to me. After all you...”

Hawke crossed to the fire, balling up the papers in his hands as he went. He tossed them into the flames and they burned. He turned back to Anders. “There. Now it’s just between us.”

A pause wound out as Anders tried find the words to begin. What could he say? ‘Tell Hawke’. Easier said than bloody done. His jaw worked. Now that the moment was here, his voice wouldn’t come. 

The silence went on just a moment _too long_ , and ticked away Hawke’s small reserve of patience. And like that, the gentleness fled. He had felt the pang of it, watching Anders turn pale before Ser Cullen. It was more than the usual fear on Anders’s face. Yes, his mage was in trouble. He had tried to create a moment that was only them -- a chance to confess, to take the offered hand -- and the ungrateful son of a bitch was just standing there with that look on his face. That butter-wouldn’t-melt, teeth-clenched stare of silence. Well, it couldn’t save him. 

Hawke took a step forward, closing the distance between them with such violent quickness that Anders instinctively shrank back, making a small sound of surprise. Hawke grabbed him by the wrists, wrapping his strong fingers around the pounding pulse points under Anders’s freckled skin. 

“Stuff the bloody templars,” Hawke said, bringing them close. “I haven’t felt like myself since that day on the Wounded Coast. That’s part of it, isn’t?” 

Anders was trying to pull away. “Hawke --”

Hawke yanked him closer. “I’m not stupid, whatever you think. Don’t try to talk around this. Tell me what’s wrong. Now.” 

Anders was shivering. Scared of him. Good. He would have the truth. Hawke knew he was frightening and he relished it, even as part of him hung back from that easy anger. He had Anders’s wrists squeezed in his hands, tight as binds, and Anders’s fingers were slowly turning from pale white to dusky and blue-tinged. They twitched and clutched a little at the empty air as Hawke stared into his eyes, golden-brown and reflecting the fire’s dancing light and guilty worry.

Anders spoke around the strangling lump in his throat. “That day... you were almost gone. I almost couldn’t save you.” 

“What happened?”

Anders was staring into his face, begging Hawke silently to listen and believe. “Everything I did, it was because I couldn’t lose you. I told you it would kill me. I meant it, even if you --” That night, when he had confessed it, when his heart had been cold at the thought of losing that newfound happiness. Hawke had grumbled that he wasn’t there to talk. Kissed him. And even now he shuddered with the memory of Hawke’s first real touch, of naked, sweating skin against his, a first time and an awakening all over again. “I saved you, but I … I made a mistake.” 

“What sort of mistake?” Hawke demanded. There was no softness in his look. 

Anders tried to pull his hands free. They were hurting, swathed in invisible cotton and sharp pins, tingling-dead with the lack of blood. 

Hawke wrapped his thumbs tighter. Not until he knew what was going on. “Tell me.”

“I went too far. I changed you.” 

“Changed how.” Hawke’s words were like whips, driving Anders forward into full confession.

Anders was very still, no longer struggling. The fear had collapsed, leaving an empty acceptance in its wake. “We’re made from the same pattern, male and female alike. The same first form.” He made sure Hawke’s dark eyes were following. Hawke was with him. “There are shadows of the other in all of us. I reached back to that first sort of life. I took the shadows, and... I made them more complete. Inside.” 

Incredulity flashed on Hawke’s face, a quick little grimacing sneer. “You’re saying...” He stopped, jerked his head to and fro in an obstinate denial. “You’re mad.”

Anders swallowed. “It’s true.” 

Hawke let him go. Anders pulled away and winced as the circulation pulsed back into his hands, like knife blades tracing his veins. “You know I’m right, Hawke. You can feel it.” 

Hawke glanced down at the formed chest piece that was too tight. He hadn’t felt proper for weeks. He’d thought it was the injury, that something hadn’t healed right. Anders was telling him a different tale -- and in Anders’s desperate eyes, he saw nothing but the truth. 

_Bloody mages._ “Whatever you did to me, reverse it.”

“I can’t.” Anders flexed his stiff fingers. He was facing Hawke and the fire, defeated but not in retreat. 

“Why?” Hawke enunciated very clearly in his anger.

Tell him. “You’re pregnant.” 

Hawke laughed, but there was nothing amused about it. “No way. No way in -- like the _Void_ I am.” 

His fingers were still screaming, but Anders moved closer and grabbed clumsily for Hawke’s hand. “I’ve thought it all through. We can go away somewhere, when the time comes. Somewhere we’ll be safe. We can tell everyone... something, I don’t know what, but it doesn’t matter. Think of it, Hawke. A baby. Ours, yours and mine. You’ll see.” 

Still shaking his head, eyes moving quickly, trying to suss out a lie, a joke, insanity, Hawke’s hand was very stiff in Anders’s grasp. “No.”

“Yes.” Anders was focused on that hope now, becoming more insistent, gaining steam. “It won’t be easy, but --”

“Fuck off,” Hawke interrupted. He pulled his hand away, flashing his palm at Anders, refusing to hear another word. 

Anders moved again to comfort him. “Hawke, I know it’s frightening, but think of the end. Think of how different things could be. Think of...” There were so many things that could change, if only Hawke were on his side. If only they had a new reason to love each other, a new reason to work and hope. A child was the answer to countless prayers, no matter how strange the situation, or how many mistakes had brought them here. They were in it, now. That was what mattered. All Hawke had to do was see. 

“Hawke,” he said, but he hung back as Hawke moved away from him.

Hawke stalked to his wardrobe. He yanked open the painted door with its pattern of yellow and red diamonds, swinging the mirror bolted to it out into the room. His hands were shaking as he unclasped his armor. He yanked it off, let it fall to the floor with a careless clank, and quickly opened the crimson, brocade tunic beneath. The smallshirt he wore under the tunic followed it to the floor, and he looked at himself. Wide, strong shoulders, dark skin, darker hair swirled high across his chest, in a curling strip down his sternum, and tapering at the shadowed hollow of his navel.

His eyes were low, at the waistband of his dark leggings. He hadn’t put on the plated greaves while dressing for Ser Cullen. He put his fingers there and traced the seam of the soft, leathery waistband across his stomach.

It wasn’t as though he truly believed any of this. Changing inside. A … the rest. It was the mad gibbering of a mage who had taken leave of his senses. They all did, sooner or later. Their minds were weakened from the beginning. The shelter and control of the tower could stave it off, but out here in the real world -- of course Anders had lost his mind. That bloody demon inside of him had sealed his fate.

He gently pressed around. The slight swell was distinctly firm, stretched muscle and something else. It wasn’t the soft flab of too many cheese courses. He had been performing poorly during sword drills, and this damned exhaustion dogging his every step...

The demon in Anders. The thought came back to him. He felt a flicker of real fear, taking in his changed shape, his fingertips perched pensively on his stomach. 

All the while, Anders had waited silently, watching the reflection of Hawke’s face, the change that came over it as he examined himself. Anger had changed into apprehension, confusion. Hawke turned away from the mirror to Anders, and Anders looked up hopefully.

“I don’t know what to think,” Hawke said finally. “It’s mad. But -- but this is just the sort of thing you would keep from me, isn’t it?” A sudden, edgy laugh. “You _would_ use your magic on me, and then...”

Anders came forward, shaking his head. “No. Maker, do you think so little of me? That I would plan this? Make you pregnant -- trap you?” He approached Hawke gently, plaintively. Showing he was no threat. “That night I took you, I didn’t know. I swear to you on my life. On my cause. And by those same lights, I swear it’s true.” 

He stood in front of his lover, stripped of his heavy armor, all vulnerable flesh and worry. By Andraste, if he could just hold Hawke. If they could just be one, that Hawke could see what Anders saw, feel what he felt. 

“How do we get rid of it?” Hawke asked quietly, crossing his arms. “A potion? A spell?” 

“Get rid of it?” Anders repeated.

“I’m not going to...” Hawke’s eyes narrowed. “You didn’t think I’d go _through_ with it.”

Anders was taken aback, fumbling for words. “I thought -- you’ll see --”

“No. No, I refuse. Even in a world where this made _sense_ , I’d have no part of it.” His arms fell loose and he held out a palm, demanding an answer. “How do I get rid of it? Which herbs?”

Anders shook his head. “The herbs only work in the first few weeks.” 

Quiet for a moment, Hawke thinking, the suspicion blossoming in his eyes. “How long have you known?” he asked. His look all but ran Anders through.

“A few days.” His heart was steady. 

Hawke glowered. “What else can we do?”

“I don’t know, love.” 

“Find out.”

“It might take time --”

“You aren’t going to help me.” Hawke had a knack for recognizing the truth, cutting through the bullshit. “All right. I’ll take care of it myself.” He put a hand to his head wearily, to his forehead where a headache was lurking. His ire hadn’t yet spent its fuel, but he was exhausted. “Get out of my house.”

“Hawke...” 

“ _Out._ ” His voice rose on the command. He fixed Anders with a look like a cornered panther. Any closer and Anders would regret it.

Anders stepped back in spirit, and toward the door in the flesh. Best to leave him be, so he could calm down. “Tomorrow. We’ll talk tomorrow, Hawke.”

“No, we won’t. Get out, and don’t come back.”

Anders had reached the bedroom door, with Hawke close on his heels, and stepped onto the landing. He turned --

The door slammed in his face, almost smashing his nose. The sound of the bolt being thrown clunked behind the heavy wooden door. 

Anders closed his eyes. He wouldn’t leave. Hawke wouldn’t mean it, come morning. He would think -- realize what they faced -- and then Hawke would need him.

Anders went to fetch a blanket from the linen cupboard, and curled up on the chair in the library.


	8. Chapter 8

Anders spent an uncomfortable night in the library, but Hawke was still inflexible the next morning. A few hard words, which Anders weathered without betraying an atom of his own roiling emotions, and Hawke commanded Bodahn to keep him out. Back to the streets, back to the clinic, and the sodden, chilly, late-year winds that howled between the cliffs of Kirkwall, funneling right into Darktown -- or so it felt to Anders, sitting at his scarred-up, loose, creaking desk with a quill in one hand, and the other shoved into his robe for warmth. Another letter to Hawke, full of circumspection but strong promises, and assurances, and pleadings. He feared what Hawke would do. Something rash, something... irreversible. He wrote a stack of letters in a short week, from his cold exile.

He got one reply, tersely-worded. Just a line, telling him to mind his own business. 

The next day, and the next, he tried to catch Hawke when he went on his way to the Gallows, but it was a fool’s errand. Anders spent hours standing in the drafty stone square, facing the house, but Hawke didn’t stir from the estate for two days. When he knocked, Bodahn kept to his orders with an apologetic smile. The little dwarf didn’t realize what he stood in the middle of, and Anders had to breathe stiffly through his teeth when Bodahn turned him, kindly, but firmly, away. 

Another day, then two, then three. Just when he was sure he would go mad, when no one in the clinic dared speak too loudly in his presence, and the fear in their eyes had reached an intensity obvious to him even through Vengeance’s ever-growling anger, he received another brief message. 

Bodahn’s writing, asking Master Anders to come to the estate. Messere Hawke was very ill. 

* * * 

Anders read the note. 

He read it, and sat quietly. No springing to his feet, rushing to the estate, no breathless questioning as Bodahn somberly admitted him, no dread-filled climb up the stairs to Hawke’s sickbed. He read the message again, and then a third time. He put it down, turned it over, stared at the half-moon smudges left by the courier’s dirty fingers. Something anchored him in place, heavy, like the weight of the city’s every stone. 

A sense of being crushed, and a deep channel carved in his chest. Through it, all the love and pain of _them_ coursed, intermingled, glowing and yet cold, and he couldn’t tell one from the other. It stung through him, lanced through every breath and was the reverberating ache in every beat of his heart. It was living with a constant bleed that made him chilly down to his bones. 

Anders’s fists clenched briefly on the desktop, crunching up the note. Hawke had done... whatever he had done. Anders, their futures, meant nothing to him after all. 

A stab of utter humiliation struck between his ribs, making his breath catch in his throat. To love someone who didn’t love back, to have given so much of himself, to see a future so bright, and have Hawke scrape it off his heel like dung… his cheeks burned, and his eyes. He wanted to hide, be alone with his wounded feelings, sink in to the new, black hopelessness that was creeping over him with the realization, because in that maybe there was welcoming oblivion. But Justice, who always sat in judgment over this silly mortal soul, was there to witness his defeat. 

Anders rounded on him, in his mind and with a weird twist of his hands and snarl on his lips. He made to drive Justice away, banish him, silence him -- but Justice was everywhere, in each thought and flash of feeling. His disapproval was bright and harsh, and Anders felt himself withering in the glare. 

There was the smallest tendril of something else, something caressing. Justice knew Anders, every idle thought, dream, desire. He had learned from his time so close to a mortal mind how to tempt, to draw Anders to him. He was a tyrant, but in his power there was pleasure. Nothing like the gritty, sweating work of flesh. It was higher, purer... intoxicating. 

The strange, warm light offered a refuge. Anders sat rigid, his stare a thousand miles away, hands motionless on the table. All Justice asked was surrender. Justice hated Hawke, but all Justice wished to do now was _protect_ Anders. Melt that hard, cold place, that frozen prison encasing his heart, wrapped in Hawke’s icy chains. 

Justice’s power was as frightening as Hawke’s. If Anders had learned anything, it was that safety... safety was an illusion. Promises were pretty things, but meaningless. Justice - Vengeance - would unmake him. It was inevitable, Anders had known from their first moment of togetherness. Justice had been caught and burned up in his rage, and Vengeance, all-consuming, had come from the flames. No accord could be struck with his savagery: from that moment, Anders had been doomed. 

A shout somewhere outside the doors, a bottle smashing, was prelude to the animal sounds of a street fight, startling Anders back to himself. It gave him enough purchase to shove Justice back.

He wasn’t finished here. 

* * *

Bodahn was glad to see him, and even tried to shake his hand when Anders arrived, but Anders shrugged away from him. Hawke was upstairs. He’d been in bed for two days, Bodahn reported, but today he’d felt strong enough for a bath. He was there now, if Master Anders --

Anders brushed Bodahn off and climbed the stairs. 

The room was hazy, the stone walls glistening with the heat and steam, and the air was thick and wet on his tongue. The stone bath in the corner of the room was square, in the Ferelden style, and in it, chest deep in too-hot water, was Hawke. 

He sat facing the door, tucked into a corner of the tub. One arm was draped over the edge. A stout, cut bottle of something amber was resting on the floor beside the bath, and Hawke’s fingers were loosely curled around the bottle’s neck. 

Hot water and whiskey. Anders recognized the desperate backstreet wisdom. Anders closed his eyes, retreating from the scene to gather his composure, while his chest started to hurt. 

Hawke looked up at Anders. He didn’t seem very surprised. “What d’you want?”

Anders came closer. “What are you doing?” 

Hawke’s hand swung, clinking and scraping the bottle along the stone floor. “All I could think of, since you wouldn’t help.”

“It’s an old wives’ tale. It doesn’t work.” Not always.

Hawke was drunk and didn’t want to hear the sadness in Anders’ voice. “Piss off.” His head fell back against the edge of the bath, and he brought the bottle to his lips again, sending another mouthful down his throat. 

Anders pushed his cuffs up his wrists. “Stop. I’ll take you to bed.”

Hawke laughed. “I don’t want to go to bed with you. I’d rather lie with a... and I’m staying right here, anyway, until...” A strangely clear look fixed on Anders, even though Hawke had swallowed a lot of whiskey. “Maker-damned mages. Every single one of you.” 

_That’s what he really thinks of me._ Maybe it was hopeless. Maybe Hawke would never... but their child. For its sake. Who knew what damage Hawke had already done? 

“ _Please_. This isn’t the way.” Anders was close enough to touch him and made a move to take the bottle, but Hawke yanked it back. 

The bottle slipped from Hawke’s hand, spilling into the bath water, bobbing. Hawke watched it with that drunkenly over-attentive, head-weaving look, unable to focus. He pushed it away, or tried, and grabbed at the stone sides. A sudden wave of dizziness struck him, and a nasty, slippery feeling inside. “... Okay.” 

Anders leaned over Hawke. He was sweating heavily, beads of it were on his forehead and face, down his neck and chest, running to the steaming water lapping at his sternum. He was pale around the lips, his dark eyes were bright with the glint of fever, like the foggy gleam on scuffed wood. He was sick. Deeply unwell. He might really have done it, Anders realized. His heart sank.

Anders ignored his own sick feeling and helped Hawke’s limp, clumsy body out of the bathtub. Hawke clung to him, very willing to let Anders prop him up on the stone tiles.

Anders grabbed up a towel and swung it around Hawke shoulders, wrapping it tight. They were face to face, Anders grasping the towel stretched around Hawke’s back, Hawke staring at him in inebriated honesty. 

“Why won’t you _help_ me?” Hawke asked, his breath sharp with the smell of drink. 

“I”ll help you however I can.” Anders held him steady. 

“Make this stop.” He meant the madness, the fear, that had rushed into his life, and Anders was to blame. This mage he thought he could control had betrayed him, somehow, in a way he didn’t quite understand. But he felt the confusion of it, agonizing, and just as frightening as the _strangeness_ inside. 

Anders rubbed his shoulders through the thick, fuzzy towel. “It’s not fair to you. I know it isn’t. But Hawke -”

“Piss off,” Hawke said again, and he pulled away. 

He didn’t get far. He was weaker - and drunker - than he thought. He turned back toward the bath, then to the door, wavered for a moment, and grabbed for Anders again.

Anders caught him. “Maker, you’re impossible.” 

He hauled Hawke to the bedroom, where Hawke tipped heavily onto the unmade bed, still naked, and put both hands to his head. The mattress, its soft dips and unsteady rolls - if he could just touch something solid, the ground, he could get his bearings. The waving, the spinning, made his stomach lurch and his throat clench. 

Too bright. Too much motion. He groaned. 

Anders was moving with anger, ferocious and tightly wound. He yanked a shirt out of Hawke’s drawer, and turned back to the bed. Hawke’s dignity wasn’t well-served, lying naked on the blankets. 

“Going to be sick?” Anders asked coldly. 

Hawke made a tight sound that Anders took to be a ‘yes’. He tossed the nightshirt over Hawke and dragged the chamber pot closer to the bed’s edge, then stalked to his wardrobe. His? The painted wardrobe that held his things. He’d been in these clothes a week days, he was starting to stink. 

The chamberpot hadn’t been washed well, and the smell reached Hawke’s nostrils, where he lay on the bed. He lunged for it. 

Anders, back turned as he changed his shirt and socks, grimaced at the sound. He focused on the wardrobe in front of him. Everything was still where he had left it. Not that he had much to his name. Shirts, leggings, long socks, a comb, a few hair ties, and at the bottom of the wardrobe, the tattered pillow that he had, much to the First Enchanter’s great amusement, actually sent for when he took up quarters at Vigil’s Keep. 

When he turned around, Hawke was face down, awkwardly clinging on the edge of the bed, breathing hard. A wet, heavy smell of spirits and bile hung in the air. Anders took the chamber pot away. 

He helped Hawke turn over and settle, and very carefully sat on the bed beside him. “What did you do?” he asked. He pulled at the tangled blankets, rescuing the sheet and drawing it over Hawke’s legs, covering him up. “Bodahn said you’ve been unwell.”

Hawke ignored him, whether from exhaustion or spite, Anders couldn’t tell. He put a hand over his eyes and groaned again. 

“It’s important. What did you take?” Whatever it was, it must have been strong, and still lingering in his blood. Home remedies were dangerous. No professional herbalism, they often relied on brute strength - some of them all but wrung the life out of a body, in the hope that the more vulnerable, tenuous little being would be taken with it. 

“Tried something I heard once. Didn’t work.” 

Anders put his hand on Hawke’s blazing forehead, above Hawke’s own fingers, still pressed against his face. A soft blue glow and the first whisper of testing magic kindled in the air, but Hawke, rallying some of his bully strength, shoved Anders’s hand away. 

“Don’t.” 

“Please.” Anders tried again, gently touching his cheek, and quietly drawing the silky sheet aside, baring the board of Hawke’s abdomen. “Let me see if you’re all right.” He meant both of them. The small bulge was obvious, with Hawke laid out on the bed. Without waiting for Hawke’s reply, Anders reached out. His fingertips just brushed Hawke’s belly, curious. 

Hawke’s hand, like a cobra, struck and knocked Anders’s away. 

“The next time you use magic on me, I’ll take your hands off.” The fever-glint gave Hawke’s words an edge, even if his voice was weak. 

Anders looked down at Hawke’s middle, dark caramel skin and the white sheet just shy of his hips. Hawke groped for the sheet clumsily. Anders seemed to cede the issue, for now, helping Hawke drag the sheet higher, and reaching out to him again. 

Hawke followed Anders’s hands suspiciously. Anders’s face was stone as he smoothed Hawke’s hair back, and laid his hand on the pillow beside Hawke’s head. Hawke met his golden eyes, dulled to brass by the shadow on his face. 

Hawke gazed up at Anders, hanging motionless over him, and he swallowed. He swiped clumsily and captured Anders’s wrist. He shook his head wearily. “I’m not doing this to hurt you.” 

Drinking made him honest. It loosened his tongue, and he cursed magic, mages, said things that made Anders flinch - but it made his heart honest, too. He didn’t want to hurt Anders. He didn’t mean to. He had promised not to. But he could see the pain in Ander’s look. Anders _was_ hurting, it _was_ his fault, but he was too tired, drunk, sick, angry to untangle it. If he could cover his ears and make it all stop. If the world would just _fuck off_ , leave the two of them alone to work it out. No magic, no spirits or martyrs, just them, man to man. Man to... 

Hawke gave a strange little half-laugh. “I’m not having a baby. Do you know how _stupid_ that sounds. I’m the Champion of Kirkwall. Ser Hawke. _Ser_ Hawke.” 

“It was an accident,” Anders said. 

“‘Magic’s natural.’” One of Anders’s favorite arguments, tossed back at him now. “Andraste’s queynte - there’s nothing natural about _this_. It’s...” 

“I know you’re scared.” Anders’s hand moved a fraction to brush Hawke’s unshaven cheek. 

Anders’s skin was chilly against Hawke’s warm face, and Hawke pressed his temple to the coolness. His brain was pounding inside his skull, and black-purple throbs of light strobed in his vision. He’d spent the last two days almost sicking himself inside out, his throat was burning and his stomach was still clenched painfully tight. He needed help, and Anders’s hand was gentle. Maybe he understood. Maybe he would help.

“Can I check?” Anders glanced down again. 

Hawke’s gaze tore away form Anders, angry but too weak to rage. Anders was fixated on some mad, spirit-fed fantasy. He couldn’t he see the man in front of him who needed help. He cared more about this invisible, unreal... _whatever it was_. He cared more about it than Hawke, who was in the here and now, and Hawke’s face twisted up.

“Fuck off,” Hawke said. The warmth of bath had faded, leaving him sweating but cold, shivering with the gentle draft that circulated between them, across his bare arms and his hot brow. His teeth chattered. 

Anders sat back, frowning, but Hawke grabbed him. Anders winced.

Hawke pulled Anders down to him. 

Anders’s body was rigid against Hawke’s chest. His cheek was awkwardly pressed in Hawke’s black hair, stringy and a little greasy with sweat, and Hawke’s sour breath hit his face in dank puffs. He could feel the tremors in Hawke’s limbs, deep shudders in his core, and Hawke’s weak but insistent cling. 

Anders wrapped his arms around Hawke’s goosefleshed body and the night-shirt that was already damp through with sweat. There was no joy or affection in it, just a heavy sense of duty, offering his warmth and a firm grip as Hawke trembled. His face, if Hawke would look, said it all. There was no love here. 

But Hawke carried their future, and Anders would safeguard it with all he had. The child would change Hawke’s mind. With Hawke at his side, he could change the world. It could happen without the terrifying roar of Vengeance’s rage. Anders would keep himself, control Vengeance, make things better - he would win. There was only darkness ahead, if this last handhold of hope gave way. Anders would protect it... even against Hawke himself, if he had to. His gaze was hard, even as he tried to breathe lightly, ignoring the smell of sick and whiskey.

His thoughts were spinning like dancers, but Hawke, under Anders’s sheltering weight, suddenly saw clearly. 

That night after he sent Anders away, he had lain in bed, resolutely not thinking, not feeling. He’d been uneasy, but he had steadfastly worked, building up a wall between himself and the truth. Don’t acknowledge it. Give it no power. Defeat it.

Dissonance: there was nothing wrong; he was taking steps to make it right.

With Anders close, the dissonance was evaporating, flashing out in weakening webs, like summer lightening trapped in the clouds. Something else - something much more frightening - was winning out. “What’s wrong with me?” Hawke asked again, voice shaking.

Anders spoke softly. “I told you the truth.”

Anders felt the rise and fall of Hawke’s chest in a nervous sigh, and the beat of his own heart counted them into a long silence. Finally, Hawke’s hand convulsed at the back of Anders’s neck. 

“I missed you,” Hawke admitted.

Anders kissed him with that same lifeless, loveless sense of duty. He used to wonder how Hawke could be so antagonistic by day, so passionate by night. Somewhere along the way, the two had blended together. There was no difference anymore.

Anders turned his face into Hawke’s hair. He was tired. He didn’t want this. The combat, making each other hurt. They were jaggedly mismatched, they cut each other up. No more.

He needed Hawke, but he didn’t have to love him for it. 

* * *

A few hours later, a suddenly rustling of limbs and sheets, and Hawke shoved at Anders. 

“Let me go.” 

Anders released him and Hawke dragged himself away. Anders sat up as Hawke escaped the bed and rushed for the door. He grimaced again, blinking - had he slept? It didn’t seem like it. Everything was dim and quiet like the grave in the fog of his mind. It cleared with a few more hard blinks, a shake of his head and rub of his eye sockets. The fire in the hearth was a pile of embers, giving nothing but a weak, effusing glow, and Anders waited for his eyes to adjust to the gloom. 

Should he follow? Anders looked at the door, standing open to the well-lit landing. He folded the covers back, ready for Hawke when he returned. He was about to get out of bed and find him when Hawke appeared back in the doorway. He passed back into the dark room and went to his wardrobe. The door squeaked as he opened it, and Anders heard the rustle of fabric as Hawke started shifting his clothes. 

“Okay?” Anders asked through the dark.

No reply. Anders waited silently, until Hawke’s shadowy form closed the wardrobe’s doors and came back to the bed. Hawke huddled beside him. 

“Hawke?”

There was exhaustion, and a spark of triumph, in Hawke’s voice. “I’m bleeding.”


	9. Chapter 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning: Discussion, portrayal of miscarriage.

Templars liked to _hear_ you pray. The dimmer ones thought volume was fervor, while the clever, cruel ones liked to hear their charges shouting the prayers, testifying against themselves. _Andraste, I have sinned._ Forcing the holy, damning words out, over and over, until some of the apprentices -- the youngest, gentlest creatures -- believed them and were in tears. Anders remembered being kept on his knees for hours, the folds of his robes digging into his kneecaps, trying to tug at the hem and clasp his hands again before one of _them_ saw, feeling light-headed as the candles burned and incense smoke curled into the choking air. He remembered the humiliation of that winter, just after his first escape. His voice had been changing. For weeks after, being marched up front to stand beside the priestess, made to recite the service almost at the top of his slipping, cracking voice. He had cried, but not because _he_ was bad -- _they_ were bad, and he cried because that was all it was in his power to do.

Anders had vowed never to pray, never to kneel, again.

He was doing both, kneeling in front of Hawke and hearing the unbidden, unwelcome, long-buried words in his head. _Maker, by you alone can I know hope._ “How much blood?” 

“A bit,” Hawke said, sounding bloody pleased with himself.

Anders had practically turned them both out of bed in his panic to get the fire re-lit, but Hawke was calm. _Happy._ The end of this farce was in sight. He lay on his side, head on his arm, breathing easily. A loose, contented look was on his face, despite the uncomfortable feeling of trickling blood and some pain. Nothing was making much of an impression, not with his heart feeling so light, suddenly let free from under the weight that had been pinning it down.

Looking so pleased with himself, while Anders was drowning. Anders’s fingers were twitchy with energy, the instinctive urge to reach with his magic. This early, he could do almost nothing, even if Hawke would let him -- but he had to try. He swallowed and asked carefully, without meekness but without much hope, “Let me help.”

“No.” Hawke mistook Anders’s concern, completely misconstrued, in the amnesia of relief, what Anders wanted. “I’m fine,” he promised.

“I don’t give a _damn_ about _you_.” The fingers of his right hand wrapped into a fist and flashed, small tongues of smokeless fire danced across his knuckles.

The quiet fury in his voice punctured Hawke’s lightly nauseous euphoria. Hakwe looked at Anders, kneeling beside the bed and motionless. Motionless the way logs rested in a fireplace -- something dangerous was consuming him. His hand was still, lit with trembling flames.

Hawke tutted almost smugly. “No more magic. No more of your tricks.”

Reading Anders was as easy as reading the sky, but Hawke felt no fear. He had lyrium in him. He had sent Sandal to get a dose of the stuff just the day before, and that particular, all-body chill filled him. It felt strange and good, like an ice cube ghosting his skin from the inside. That pleasure was on him, he was taken with it, it made him headily confident in his own power. He could face a mage. Anders was slender, his shoulders were narrow under that feather-tufted robe. He had old injuries that haunted when it was cold. For all the magic, the influence of that demon, he was a body. A human body, with aches and pains and wrists that Hawke could clasp in one hand. Stark blue veins under so-pale skin, ready for Hawke to tear open. At the moment, high on his escape, Hawke could conquer anything.

Anders sensed his defeat. He reached for the mattress. Hawke steeled himself, but Anders’s long fingers just grasped the edge, the blankets, and fell still. He didn’t have the strength to touch Hawke. They were at the end. He saw the black cliffs ahead. “Why did you do this?”

Hawke made an impatient sound in his throat. 

“For years you’ve been telling me to find another way.” Anders dropped his head, too tired to hold it up. His shoulders slumped. The weight of the world, his soul, full of Justice and his hate, dragged him toward the earth. He put his forehead to the mattress. “What do you _want_ of me?” he asked, dead-voiced. He knew too well what Justice wanted -- demanded. “I tried. I tried to hold him back. And when there was finally hope... you take it away.”

Hawke rolled onto his back, and the tight, cramped pain inside moved with him. He winced, folded his arms across his stomach, and took a breath. “The world doesn’t need another mage.” 

Anders closed his eyes and spoke to the floor. “That’s all that decided you? That our child might be like me?” 

Hawke spoke to the ceiling. “With you and my father, I can’t take any chances.” 

Anders raised his head, but it didn’t seem worth the effort. Hawke was the enemy. He had so many. One more scarcely made a difference.

Hawke’s father. A ghostly echo in a forgotten place, a voice with such power and life, even in death, that it had given Anders chills. Anders was such a broken reed compared to that man, who had been clever enough, strong enough, brave enough, to _live_ : severed his chains, taken everything the world would have denied him. Begotten his children, died free. A man - a mage - to admire. 

“Did you love him?” Anders asked. It was suddenly important to know. 

A cloud came over Hawke’s face, darkening his brow and narrowing his eyes. 

There was a moment of utter, defeated silence, as Anders huddled on his knees and Hawke lay unmoving on the bed. 

Finally, when Anders saw no answer was coming, he got up. He gasped as the stiff knee he kept wrapped in bandages pulled and almost gave. The knee was a reminder of a stupidly-judged path through a ravine on a rainy day. The fall had left him hunched in the undergrowth, clay mud all over his hands and robes, trying not to scream. That had been Justice’s first taste of real, mortal pain, and he had soaked up the feeling with interest, while Anders ground a few loops of bandages between his teeth and tried to knit the ligaments back together. He hadn’t managed it perfectly. He limped away from the bed. 

Hawke spoke quietly; Anders almost didn’t hear him over the ringing in his ears: “He always thought the world would give way.”

Anders looked up. He heard something _new_ in Hawke’s voice. An anger that had no equal; hatred from a place of hurt, ragged and raw. After all their years together, a place in Hawke Anders had never suspected. But Hawke was full of rooms. Unexpected rooms, a maze of closed doors, and behind them, phantoms. Demons and saints. Anders looked at the dark wells of Hawke’s eyes, and held himself against falling in. He could drift deeper and deeper and never find the truth. 

But Anders couldn’t turn away. He wasn’t sure what he was waiting for -- but Hawke looked on the verge of saying something, and Anders hung on for his next word. 

“It never gave,” Hawke said bitterly. But they had all been made to pretend. If there was a frown, Father couldn’t rest until he had sent it away. So many times when they were little, whenever he or Carver were sad or mad, ‘moping’, his father had descended with kisses, tickling fingers, until they were squirming and giggling and Father was satisfied. Hawke had spent so much time laughing when he was furious, the righteous anger of their loneliness, the unfairness of their hidden lives -- Father hadn’t wanted to see any of it. Instead he tried to drown the lurking dark with the helpless, laughing tears streaming down their cheeks.

Mother had played along. She kept smiling, when they had to pack and go, when she told them stories of Kirkwall, her family, this house. She brought out her memories like delicate, beautiful things, let her children touch them gently, gaze at them in wonder. Always smiling, for _him_ \-- and Hawke had come to hate him for it. His father was in love with his own freedom, his own happiness. What of theirs? When all Hawke wanted was for someone to see the hurt, his father grinned and looked the other way. And it still made something ball up in Hawke’s throat, so it was hard to breathe and he had to speak softly. “We were miserable. He didn’t care.”

Anders heard him. He felt the wound, the same hurt that turned his thoughts to heart-stinging, lung-choking poison when he thought of the templars, of the Circle, of his father’s horrible, wide eyes that day in the barn. 

But Hawke was wrong. He had chosen to hate his father, his father’s magehood, not those who were really to blame. He had let it make him narrow and angry.

“He cared.” Anders sank awkwardly beside Hawke, perching on the bed. “He did all he could. He wanted you to be happy.” 

Hawke looked at him uncertainly.

“I know things were hard.” Anders nodded slowly, hoping, at last, Hawke would _see_. “The Chantry is to blame. If they didn’t bind us in the Circle, if --”

Hawke grimaced. The Circle. Bloody templars. Anders had no room for anything else. Hawke sniffed in derision, but his eyes stung. “You’re just like him.”

“And you really hate that so much?” 

Hawke turned over again, moving stiffly, curling his knees up to try to crush the aching pain inside. He exhaled slowly, trying to relax around it. The pressure in the bowl of his pelvis was growing, like stiff muscles tearing and a hard knot of fullness. The pain stayed no matter how he moved, trying to ease the pull. 

Anders watched him curl up. “Does it hurt?” he asked.

“Yes.” 

Anders leaned over. “Relax.” 

Anders’s hands were warm. “No magic,” Hawke snapped. 

“No,” Anders promised. He rubbed Hawke’s shoulders, pressing his thumbs under his large, blunt shoulder blades, kneading the thick cords of muscle beneath his skin and the cool, whispering night shirt. His hands were only warm in comparison. “You’re cold.”

Hawke shook his head, awkwardly stretching out on the mattress. He put his face into his pillow and tried to get comfortable. Anders followed his back, the barrel of his ribs around the dipped groove of his spine. 

“Lower.” Hawke hesitated. “Please.”

Anders moved his hands, flat-palmed, to the base of Hawke’s spine. He kept the pressure firm and even, working as a counterweight against the ache inside. 

In his mind’s eye, he saw them. Hawke lying out in front of him, himself bent over. The fire, the whiteness of Hawke’s shirt and the down-turned sheets, the slow breaths, the black strands of Hawke’s hair falling free. Deceptively close, deceptively gentle. 

If he could peel back the scar tissue that had grown over Hawke’s wounds, and dig out the barbs that had been left festering, draw out that old poison. That would be a reprieve, at the last minute of the eleventh hour. A last effort, before Anders reached the end of his hope and sanity. Spotting and a backache; it could be nothing. It was still early. A bit of blood didn’t mean... he used the heels of his palms to furrow along either side of Hawke’s backbone, smoothing down his hips. 

“Hawke,” he said.

Hawke was taking measured breaths into the fold of his arms. He raised his head a fraction. 

“Let me check you. Then I’ll know what’s happening.” 

“Magic?” Hawke asked defensively.

“No.”

Hawke hugged the pillow. He bit his lip. “Do it.” 

Anders poured out a shallow dish of water, put out a thin lozenge of soap and towels, and got the oil. He returned to Hawke, who was back on his side, doubled up, and crawled onto the bed behind him.

“Just a minute. You’ll feel my fingers.”

Hawke stared at the far wall. This was usually more fun, he thought, but it came to him darkly. He was in no joking mood. His face was as grim and distant as Anders’s, who had poured some oil over his hand and was slicking his fingers up to the knuckles. 

Hawke flinched as they slipped in, just gave him time to stretch, and kept pressing. 

Anders wasn’t sure how the magic had worked on Hawke’s flesh, what exact changes it had wrought. He went quickly, charting the inner contours, which were sticky with traces of blood. Looking for...

He found it. A thick, sturdy ring, pliable as he applied pressure. Hawke jumped, inhaling at the sharp twinge inside, twisting his hips and trying to wrench away. 

“Maker, would you --” 

Anders’s other hand was on his shoulder, squeezing. “I need to feel. Take a deep breath.”

Hawke lay back. Anders’s hand was still rubbing his arm and he took a few slow breaths. “Okay.”

Hawke relaxed around his fingers, and Anders tried again. As he explored, two fingertips slipped in with ease. Hawke gave another quiet gasp, ignored by Anders, whose own heart was thudding deafeningly in his ears. His free hand clutched Hawke’s shoulder suddenly, digging in his fingertips and the short edges of his nails.

Opening, dilating, meant only one thing: Hawke had done it. The little life was gone, or soon would be. His body was making ready, it was inevitable. There was nothing Anders could do.

Just blood and tissue to be purged. Expelled, discarded. Everything that could have been, dropped in a chamber pot and tossed in the slop.

The last thread of hope snapped, giving his heart one last slicing, stinging whip as it broke. His face hardened and he took his fingers away. They were smeared with blood and oil.

Justice rose in triumph.

* * * 

He got up without a word, washed his hands, retreated to the writing desk. He would keep vigil. He owed that much to their babe. Son or daughter? He would never know. But he couldn’t stay on the bed with Hawke, listening to him turning and shifting. 

He sat at the writing table, eyes fixed on the calendar he had excitedly marked out. All symbols, nothing Hawke, or templar eyes, would understand. Estimates. When they would feel the first motions, his best guess at the day that would change their lives. All those milestones, beacons that could have lead them out of the dark. He dipped his quill and scratched at them, blotching and tearing until they were gone.

He flipped to the very end of the calendar and slowly, methodically, began to cross off every single day, slicing away at the time left to him. He obliterated the last week of Twelfth Month, and kept working back. He would keep today, he thought. Today, and perhaps tomorrow. And that was all. 

Hawke tried to sleep, but the tightness inside had settled into slow, burning waves. Whatever Anders had done, the cramping was worse. He couldn’t stay still. He tossed, turned, got up and tried to get relief by pacing -- always under the guise of looking for something, going downstairs to write a quick message, some other excuse. 

Not that it mattered. Anders ignored him and his pain, letting him feel it without a shred of pity. 

The dizziness got worse, and he was forced back onto the bed. Anders, still stabbing at the calendar, tried to shut his ears to Hawke. His body was letting their child go.

At first light, the house was graced by another visit from Ser Cullen. Bodahn was an early riser, used to a few hours to himself before the master and Sandal woke, and was lingering over his coffee and sweet biscuits next to the kitchen fire when the gong sounded. He set the half-eaten sweet back on his saucer and went to answer the door.

Cullen put his hand flat on the door, wedging it open. “Tell the Champion that I need to see him. Immediately.”

Bodahn hauled open the door. “If you’d wait in the library, serrah.” 

Cullen looked around in agitation. “Make it quick. It’s important.”

“Of course, serrah.”

Bodahn trucked officiously upstairs. A nervous templar come calling again. Dear, dear. 

Bodahn had spent ten years here, and he sensed the changing of the wind. Master Anders was a pleasant enough man. Bodahn wouldn’t speak against him even in his own head. But the last few weeks, Bodahn had felt that maybe, just maybe, it was time to move himself and the boy along. 

Nothing against the man. Pleasant fellow. Amused Sandal with his word-twists, and it was heartening, gratifying, to see a mage like him - well-studied, a real education - so interested in the boy’s work. Some of the pride rubbed off, and Bodahn got to bask a little too. But the offer from Orlais had a gilt stamp, the ink was the deepest blue Bodahn had ever seen, the writing was all elegant, swooping curls, and the paper was infused with scent, delicate, but it had lasted all the way from court. The letter and thick envelope were heavy in his breast pocket. Yes, might be time to move along.

On the landing, outside the bedroom door, Bodahn paused. All quiet. With Master Anders back, the quiet was unexpected. Bodahn curtained his ears when he could, but he and the two masters lived under the same roof. When they weren’t hissing and scratching like Kirkwall alley cats, they were arching their backs and howling. Like Kirkwall alley cats. 

Bodahn quashed a smile. That reminded him. He’d have to tell Sandal about the mushrooms and the caves _one_ of these days. He’d understand a few more of Miss Isabela’s little jokes, then. … Maybe it was better the boy didn’t. 

Bodahn knocked with one square fist and heard voices murmur behind the door. 

The door opened a crack, and Master Anders peered at him. “What.” No hint of charm or friendliness. 

Bodahn smiled, polite, unthreateningly servile. “Ser Cullen is downstairs for Messere Hawke.”

“He’s not well,” Anders snapped. He had the door firmly in his hand, holding it a few inches from the jamb, blocking the dwarf’s entry with his body and his drawn, determined look. Bodahn glanced into Master Anders’s wide eyes. It was like being peeped at from the window of the madhouse. Yes, it was time to move on.

Hawke’s voice came from behind. “I’ll see him.” 

In the bedroom, Hawke swung his feet over the edge of the bed and caught himself on the post. His knuckles whitened as he waited for the world to twist to a stop, like a spinning top coming to rest. The ringing in his ears sharpened and reached a particular, shrieking pitch, and the floor, waving under his feet, was suddenly full of shifting, fuzzy black holes. 

Anders watched him coldly. “You won’t make it downstairs. Get back in bed.” 

Hawke carefully looked up. Anders stood looming over him, looking very... solid. “I have to see him. What will he tell Meredith if I don’t?”

Anders shrugged. He didn’t care, he didn’t need Hawke’s favors. There was nothing more he wanted from Hawke. He sat at the table, watching the candle burn. 

* * * 

Hawke leaned on the wall outside the library, trying to breathe the dizziness away. He stayed like that for a long moment, hand pressed to the wall’s rough stone, his vision far-away and faint. He clenched his teeth and went in.

Ser Cullen was in full Order regalia, looking quite official next to the Champion’s night shirt and dark leggings. Hawke looked at their feet; Ser Cullen’s shining, heavy boots, his house slippers. “Excuse my appearance.” 

The social script called for a line here, an apology for intruding, a wish for the Champion’s good health, but Cullen had no time for niceties. “We’ve lost track of the apostate.” 

Hawke tilted his head carefully. “Oh, is that all.” Hawke forced himself to smile. It was vicious. “He’s back here with me.”

“You didn’t inform the Knight-Commander,” Cullen protested. “She was greatly disturbed.” 

“I didn’t think a little tiff would be of any interest to the Knight-Commander.” More cramping, like he had a knife blade prodding at his insides. A sheen of sweat beaded on his forehead and face, and his look got more savage. “It’s none of your business.”

This was his duty, Cullen reminded himself. No matter how unpalatable. “Champion, with the utmost respect, it is. You’ve been extended every courtesy, of course, but the apostate is no small matter.”

“He has a name.”

“Of course,” Ser Cullen said. They all had names. Yappy little dogs had names, too. “We’ve equipped you to control him, but you cannot expect us to ignore him completely. You’re his keeper, but we have a responsibility to the people of Kirkwall. We take it seriously.”

Hawke felt the ghost of Anders’s warm hands on his still-aching back. These templars came into his home, demanded answers... well, what if he gave them? Unvarnished. Unequivocal. So much truth around here, lately. Why not a little more. “He and I are lovers.”

Ser Cullen’s cheekbones colored. “Champion, I...” 

“I’ve no right to treat him like a child. Don’t you agree?”

Cullen’s heart sank. He recognized the signs. He _should_ : Meredith had him hunting among their ranks day after day for those who had fallen to softness, the creep of sentimentality. Living alongside their charges, one’s guard could wane. Natural, perhaps, but it was weakness. And weakness, where mages were concerned, was danger.

The Champion’s relationship with the apostate had always been a matter of concern. But Ser Hawke had thrown himself into every training regimen they set for him, supported their administration, never wasted time listening to Orsino’s shrewing. They hoped this day would be a long time coming -- the Champion was so bright and strong, seemed to have such a clear, hard mind and heart. Ser Cullen had argued that it was safest to let the Champion distract the apostate, manage him. (There was some stability, at least, in the two of them orbiting each other. To knock them apart would be to light a chain reaction, and where would it end?) He respected Ser Hawke very much, and it pained him -- yes, it did -- to see this soft spot, to know what it signified. Corruption. Like a bruised fruit ready to burst into rot. 

Hawke, meanwhile, was hunching over the table as if he was looking for something. He inhaled deeply to gather some of the cramping pain, and exhaled slowly to try to send it away. 

Cullen watched him suspiciously. He had come to the estate hoping to put both his and the Knight-Commander’s mind at ease. Instead, he had an unpleasant duty ahead of him. He had to report this. They couldn’t let these two carry on. The Champion and the apostate. Maker help them both. 

Maker help them all. “I’m sorry to find you unwell. I’ll take my leave.”

Hawke grunted. He concentrated on the desktop and his breathing as Cullen met Bodahn at the library door and was quietly shown out. 

* * * 

Anders was quickly scrawling a few things, bent over the table with the quill in his grip, book and hand close to the candle. He didn’t look up when Hawke came in. 

“And how was Ser Cullen,” Anders asked bitingly. 

“I told him you were back here with me.” Hawke moved into the room with his hand trailing on the wall. He looked across the bit of open floor between himself and the bed, and then closed his eyes and focused on the feel of his feet on hard stone. 

“Then you lied.” Anders sneered. “Lied to your dear templar friend. That was very naughty of you. We were taught _never_ to lie to a templar.”

“You’re leaving?” 

Anders snorted. “No. I’m buying the house out from under you. I’m going to turn _you_ onto the streets for a change.”

“If you go, I’ll have to report it.” Hawke summoned up some of his strength, pushed away from the wall, and moved to the bed. 

Anders glanced at him with scorn. “To be sure! Tell them everything. I couldn’t rest, thinking anything passed between us that _they_ didn’t know about.” 

Hawke sat on the edge of the bed and grimaced. He felt his stomach in unease, pressing gently at the knot below his navel. It was strange, rock-hard, and feeling full. Almost unbearable pressure, burning, like a fist inside had clenched around hot coals. “How long is this going to go on?”

“Until it’s finished.” 

“What should I do?”

Anders jammed his book closed and snapped the pen as he slammed it onto the tabletop. He rounded on Hawke. “Whatever you like,” he said acidly. “Why ask me? This is what you wanted.” 

Hawke’s shoulders hunched. “Anders...”

Come on. Defend yourself. Prove me wrong, Anders thought, silently challenging the fear he sensed. He had no pity, not for this man who was against mages, against Anders and his love, against all he had worked for. Anders was capable of true coldness, and in this moment he felt no reason to warm to Hawke. 

“All right. What will happen.”

Anders spoke curtly. “Blood. Some tissue. It’s early yet.” 

Hawke bent double, and Anders heard a light groan. They waited for a moment, Anders glaring, Hawke breathing with his eyes were screwed shut. It wouldn’t be much longer, if Hawke was in that much pain. 

Anders hated him. 

Hawke pressed his knuckles into his forehead. Another moment. Then, as quickly as it had come, it was gone. He stood unsteadily. “I’m going to have a bath.”

“Fine,” Anders shot back. He was moving toward his wardrobe.

“Where will you be?” 

“Getting my things.” Anders pulled on his faded, green, stained brocade robe over his long shirt. His voice was ice. 

* * * 

Hawke left, and Anders started a final search.

He began downstairs in the library, paging through the books and papers. He had hidden a lot here: letters from friends. A few from Varric, friends elsewhere. He had burned the letters from Karl long ago -- had he really done that, for Hawke? He had. Back when he still believed he could prove his loyalty and love, that the tribunal of magehood could end. 

Those precious words were gone, but other things remained. In a few days’ time, things that seemed innocuous would become contagion. Justice wouldn’t let him leave a scrap. It took an hour, then two, to do a thorough search of the library, ferret out all of the volumes he had used as hiding places and feed whatever he found into the fire. He had known this day was coming -- why hadn’t he been more organized? He had never managed that. His plans never quite came together, he had never quite gotten himself in order. He had been stuck fast in the morass of the meaningless day to day, drowning in pettiness and distraction and... 

It was better, now. With Justice in control. Justice doing the thinking, moving his hands. He finally saw how pathetic, how useless he had been. 

When it was done, when it had all been burned safely to ashes, Anders returned to their bedroom. He stood for a long time before the wardrobe full of his odds and ends. ‘Getting his things.’ He didn’t need things. Not where he was going. 

Anders folded a last pair of socks together, tucked them next to their worn companions in the drawer, and hung up a stray shirt. He wanted it to be neat. He couldn’t remember which things Hawke had paid for, now, which were gifts, and which he had begged or borrowed. He wouldn’t have anything be missed. He was no thief. 

The shirt’s hem just brushed the lumpy, tawny pillow that sat at the bottom of the wardrobe, and Anders paused. 

Varric had refused it. Anders blushed; he didn’t know what had come over him. He had thought Varric would prop it somewhere, maybe. Somewhere it could take up the smoke and song and life of Varric’s suite, always bright and full of voices. 

Who would want this? he asked himself, now that his vision was clear. It was tattered. It looked like it might have things _living_ in it. 

But it was his. It seemed a shame to leave it to rot in the dark. 

He picked it up. It was soft and worn, his cheek was tickled by threads escaping their stitches. Not a trace of his mother’s gentle scent, no matter how he turned it and pressed his nose. It had taken on the smell of the tower not many weeks after he arrived, a crutch that had quickly been knocked away, the only flicker of kindness before the jaws closed. The tower’s smell -- a peculiar tumble of odors, growing bodies and ancient stone -- had all but faded now, too.

Damp had gotten into it while it sat in a chest in Darktown. A musty, earthy smell rose as he kneaded. He rested his face against the scratchy, threadbare material, cradling a handful of stuffing, and thought of him and Karl. Quick moments of giggling, playful wrestling, sending the pillows, blankets, and the books that were always folded, secreted into his sheets for company -- voices in his head, to speak gently and drown out the sound of templar boots -- slipping from the bed to the floor. It was only later, when Karl had snuck off back to his quarters and every trace of his warmth had gone from the bed, that Anders had gathered up the pillow and hugged it to his chest. They couldn’t linger in the tower. No time or place for the small, gentle things of love, the things that kept the soul -- and toes -- from feeling the cold. This moldy, unraveling lump had been a haven for that human part of him, the part that loved and mourned and needed to be kept warm.

He didn’t need it any more. Justice was eager to begin. And that would be the end.

He placed the pillow into the wardrobe with both hands, nestling it in its coffin, and closed the wooden door. 

* * *

Anders stepped over Dog, and the mabari growled. Anders had been scared of the animal, a brute with a reddish glare in his eyes, and slabs and knots of muscle all over. But Anders was no longer afraid of Hawke, of anything. He ignored the dog’s twitching lips and glistening fangs. He was untouchable. The world was hollow and he alone was real. 

He opened the heavy door into the washing room. 

Hawke’s form was a shadow in the bath. The water was crimson, dark red at the bottom, an ugly pink at the surface. One of Hawke’s hands was over his eyes. The beds of his fingernails were bluish and pale.

Anders looked away. “Is it done?” 

Hawke nodded wordlessly. 

Anders crossed the floor quickly, and jabbed two stiff fingers against Hawke’s neck. The pulse was strong. Hawke would live. Probably.

Hawke looked up. He had cried. He wasn’t sure why. Sitting here alone, feeling that agony, the water becoming bloodied and dark, he had suddenly wept. Was this right? He didn’t know anymore. What had he done? Anders was leaving and he couldn’t stop him. 

Anders saw the tracks of Hawke’s tears, but nothing inside moved. No spring of pity, no trickle of warmth. Like wheels rusted in place, no longer capable of turning, every piece of his soul was still. The things that had distracted him, made him suffer, couldn’t touch him anymore. 

Hawke shivered in the warm, red water. “Anders, please. Whatever you’re planning... don’t do it. Stay here.” 

Anders gave him a silent look. Justice’s power was a rod of hot steel in Anders’s spine. The power he, no, _they_ had, made the tips of his fingers tingle and his toes curl in his boots. He had let Justice fill him and the spirit was a wonderful, numbing antidote, it had finally extinguished any tiny spark, any guilt, any claim Hawke might make on his heart. 

It was so easy now. He should have done this years ago. “Goodbye, Hawke.” 

* * *

**_Meredith’s Office_ **

Hawke stood on the carpet in front of Meredith’s desk. He dreaded the interview, but dreaded even more what they would do to Anders when they found him. “He left two days ago. I don’t know where.”

Meredith paced around her desk. “You didn’t ask?” she questioned, looking the Champion up and down suspiciously.

“I was... ill.” Hawke shook his head. “I would have come sooner --”

Meredith interrupted. “We’ve been watching. My men are already looking for him.” Her blue eyes were diamond-hard, a hundred thousand glinting facets of paranoia, distrust, dislike. 

Hawke bit the inside of his lip. “What are their orders?” 

“When they find him, they will return him to the tower.” Her eyes flashed. “I will decide from there.” 

Hawke’s mouth was dry. The hair was rigid on the back of his neck as he realized, for the first time, what a fiend this woman was. He was in the presence of a true mania. “Bring him back to me. Whatever he’s done, I will set it right.” 

“From what Ser Cullen tells me --” Cullen wished himself invisible as the Champion’s look landed on him -- “Your judgment can no longer be trusted. We cannot let you go on endangering yourself and the city. The apostate has seen the end of our patience.” 

Hawke rolled his eyes tightly, more of a quick, angry roam around the room’s walls. “I _assure_ you --”

The door of Meredith’s office opened. She looked away from the Champion’s excuse making and nodded to the templar at the door. 

“Orsino, ma’am. He’s making trouble in the courtyard. And the apostate is with him.”

**_Gallows Courtyard_ **

The sun was shining clearly, but it was a weak, chilly light. 

“I _will_ search the tower. Secreting apostates --”

Anders saw Hawke. Upright, and looking more alive than he had any right to. Had Hawke followed him? Perhaps, but if he had, Anders had been forgotten for a bigger spectacle. Hawke was trying to press between the First Enchanter and the Knight-Commander, making their little circle complete. Orsino coiled at this new threat, and the words flew in earnest. 

Hawke was taking Meredith’s side.

Anders knocked his staff on the courtyard’s stone. A tiny, shivering bit of magic ran away into the earth.

Hawke was talking, Meredith and Orsino were talking. Everyone’s attention was fixed on the Champion, the First Enchanter, the Knight-Commander, their gazes locked and their bickering frenetic between them. 

“You will not bring Her Grace into this --”

Like children, chasing each other round and round a tree. While mages, his brothers and his sisters, hung and bled. He knocked his staff again. 

Across the bay, in the towering heart of Kirkwall, the Grand Cleric would be praying at her candles. Their flames would be stirring, and perhaps she was looking up, wondering. Something had taken a breath. Maybe she felt unease, but she couldn’t be sure anything was wrong. 

If she ran now, Anders thought, she might make it. 

But she was undecided. 

Justice moved his feet, shoved him forward. He found his own voice. “The Grand Cleric cannot help you.” He didn’t look at Hawke. “There can be no half measures. There can be no turning back.” 

He was justice. He was the beginning and end, peripeteia, the fire touched off, the finger on the scales. 

_Knock._


	10. Part Two: Chapter One

_Get out of here...._

So much rage that his heart might burst. But in Hawke’s _eyes_ , there were flashes of that night, and his promise: “I’ll never hurt you.” Anders felt Hawke’s look digging deep between his shoulder blades as he left the courtyard, the way Hawke’s knife could not.

Anders rejected the pretense, the hollowness of that offered salvation. He was a dead man walking. He reached the Gallows in the confusion, the shaking arms and frightened faces of his brothers and sisters, and together they prepared to stand and fall.

 _...You lost the moral high ground with the chantry..._

Their flimsy lines broke, the doors smashed in, the weight of templars and steel, a thousand years of history and wrong, smashing those whose only crime had been to look _up_. 

Hawke met him in a place of fire. They stood face to face, there on the steps of Templar Hall, everything they had hoped about one another burned away. They had eyes only for each other, even as the Gallows groaned and ignited with the hate of ages; old memories streamed around them in tatters, in a bright hum of magic and the shrieks of the damned, the echoes of pain in every blood-splashed stone. It had all lead to this. They weren’t lovers, now, nor men, nor even human: they were mage and templar, separated by a totality of heart and mind and purpose that defied all redemption or reconciliation. They were mortal enemies, they were strangers.

Hawke ran him through. 

And now he lay beaten on these steps, in this City of Chains, his life blood surging out of him, sent by a heart that was heavy and hurting and tired. 

The promised release, the ecstasy, Justice’s touch -- where was it? Beyond the hot blood and pain, maybe, through the blackness he saw billowing up, filling his vision and the horizon. Like an army cresting a hill, like a far-off city aflame... he saw what he had done, he felt it, every brick and soul, and a mouthful of blood spilled down his chin as he sobbed. 

_I’ve done what you asked. I’ve done it._ He begged Justice for the end. Send him to judgment, he was exhausted of the trial. 

A templar with the boot against his head; Anders prayed for him to do his job. Make it quick. Make it _stop_. 

_Look who it is. Fetch the Champion._

He heard Hawke rattling off orders like hammer strikes on an anvil. 

Hands turned him over, roughly, rolled him onto his back on the gore-smeared steps. The world flared white and came back with a high-pitched whine that merged with his vision, somewhere in his dying brain: slowly shuttering, his thoughts spent of their energy, spinning down into darkness, like a ship sinking beneath the waves. But he could see Hawke.

“What do we do with him, Champion?” One of the gathered templars, all with blades drawn, wary even of a lone, dying mage. While the heart beat, while thought stirred, while the soul was still in the flesh, there was a crack. A path to worlds unfathomable. 

“Please.” Anders’s lips formed the word, but there was no breath left in him to give it voice. End it. Anything but to be saved, anything but to spend one moment more here. He wanted the black release. He tried to shake his head, to make Hawke understand. 

Hawke crouched beside Anders’s body, one knee dipping, soaking up some of the blood creeping along in its deep rivulets. Anders’s copper eyes were enormous, almost transparent with fear. He touched Anders’s cold face, smudging the crimson leaking from his mouth. Damning benediction, savage gentleness, his hand stayed by the plea he thought he read in Anders’s eyes. 

_No._ Anders shook his head again, thrashing weakly as his lungs, against the desperate scream in his heart, tried to breathe.

Hawke’s look changed, became grim-faced mercy that knew it had a hard task. He called for healers.

Had they ever understood one another? The shadows crowded in, and Anders slipped free. 

* * * 

The fires were extinguished, but not before they left their scars on the city and men’s minds. Worse was the empty air where the chantry had stood. A beacon, an authority, a solid height, a cornerstone of this world: gone. In the dazed silence, Kirkwall, the Free Marches, all of Thedas looked nervously to that hole, that absence, and wondered. Waited. For the foundation to _shift_.

* * * 

Kirkwall summers meant flies and wallop, pick-up games down every alley, the busiest months for trade and commerce, ships laden with cargo and sailors packing the wharf districts, spilling over into Lowtown. The streets brimming with crowds, the boarding houses full up, and the bars, too. Long sun-washed days of cacophony, kinetic, all tumble and careless noise and life. 

Not now. The dust had settled and it was as though none dared disturb it. The blinding sun baked near-empty pavement: a pall hung over the city, a terrified silence, a hopeless, anxious skittishness, silence as heavy as the mountains. The streets like hollow bones, cracked, dry, haunting. All was still - but. Here and there, pockets that roiled with furtive motion, like maggots in the flesh of a carcass.

In this tense, hot summer, Hawke became Viscount, and took up his office in the stifling Keep. 

His first days were full of schmoozing nobles, their sleeves as puffy as their egos, pasted-on grins and undertones of resentment. The Viscount’s office had been the prize in a long game between the leading families of Kirkwall, those with pedigrees stretching back into pre-memory and a roster of kin-friends nestled in chateaus all over Thedas. “Amell” was not a new name, it had sat around long enough to gather a bit of golden dust, and these old families, if they stumbled, could be revitalized with an infusion of buttery sovereigns. But “Amell” was lost, and “Hawke” had the tang of scandal. It wasn’t the usual -- they all had skeletons stuffed to bursting in the family chiffoniers, but these were the mundane, understandable sorts: Ser So and So had been with his father when he ‘jumped’, Lady Whatsit looked a little too fondly at mabari hounds - but no son or daughter of their houses had ever run off with a mage and sent the tainted lineage back to Kirkwall to roost.

Taking the office was stepping into a contest that had raged for ages, with battle lines well-drawn and all sides dug in to a stalemate. Hawke did what he did best: ignored. Barrelled through, smashed what walls he could, and took pleasure in watching noblemen flinch and well-I-never. It made him no friends, but Hawke wasn’t bothered. He didn’t need friends. 

He had his comrades, the small gang of faces that he had gathered up from low and strange corners. Apart from Aveline, they didn’t come to the Keep. They were too real, they might shatter the noble, jeweled-navel-gazing illusion that any of it _mattered_. The illusion was already wisp-thin, brittle, very old glass just clinging in a spindly frame of reference. 

His friends didn’t impose on him at home, either. Hawke had always gone his own way, always responded to their warmth guardedly. He was a man easily admired, but difficult to love. The walls were high, the gates firmly shut.

It was inconceivable that Hawke could _need_ them. Hawke wasn’t a needy man. Could he have been stained, dogged, haunted by what he saw in the Gallows? Could he spend his days half-dreading the night ahead? Surely not. He was strength, inside and out. Could a statue grieve? A citadel? A stone?

If Hawke mourned what he had lost, if some nights he stood at the window as the sun set and watched, unsleeping, until it rose again, a shadow-play of what was gone constantly before his eyes - they never knew it. 

He descended to Lowtown once, to the heady smoke, sicking drunks, and swearing waitresses, don’t-ask lumps in the gravy and finger-smudged pint glasses. Varric sat by and _talked_ while Hawke silently drank. 

Talk wasn’t what he needed. He needed sleep, but sleep didn’t come any easier, even as his burning mind and loose joints craved it. 

The pillows smelled of Anders. 

* * *

Fenris’s hands rested on the balustrade. Like an animal keyed to every quiver of air in its den, he had heard the door open. He stood on the upper landing, looking down at the floor cross-patched with the full moon’s light. His whole body seemed to follow Hawke, tensing, as Hawke crossed the scuffed and broken floor and ascended the stairs. The debris of crumbling walls and old, moth-chewed tapestries drifted in and out of moonbeams, busy flecks sent in little whirls of air as Hawke moved through them. A flash like lightning glinted in his seeking eyes. 

Hungry. Fenris’s stomach lurched. Dread and excitement -- he knew Hawke would come. Hawke had starvation in his glance, the frustration of empty air between his teeth. Fenris had always seen it. There was some want in him that the mage never filled. 

And both recognized that Fenris was the answer; between them was a deep likeness: both of them hunters, wildmen who saw in each other that gleeful strength, that power and energy that yearned for nothing so much as itself. 

This wasn’t the first time Hawke had come to him. Once before. A low point -- “Have you quarrelled again?” -- Hawke and that hated hypocrite -- and Hawke’s too-flippant reply. “We’re always quarrelling.” 

Fenris had driven him away. He refused to be an accompaniment, the thigh caressed beneath the tablecloth and the world none the wiser. He was no dog happy to gnaw scraps. 

Yet here Hawke was again. His footsteps landed a note too heavily in the dim and drifting quiet, and Fenris hated the sound -- dust motes danced, buried things stirred. 

Fenris sized him pu. Hawke looked every inch as tired as he was, and more: haunted, like he had shaken himself out of a nightmare. They greeted each other silently. Hawke turned, rested his elbows on the balustrade, and they stood side by side for a moment. The atmosphere _congealed_.

“Quiet night.” Hawke said at last.

Fenris growled. “It’s too warm.” 

Hawke quirked his eyebrow.

Fenris pushed off the wide railing. “Outside.” He looked to Hawke as if for permission - but flashing with defiance, too. He turned away from Hawke’s impassive face and padded to the iron-bound door on the landing. He unbolted it, hauled against its creaking hinges, and stepped outside. 

There was a balcony there, a story above the street. The neatly potted plants had grown thick. Airborne seed had taken root beside the show-flowers Danarius had once chosen with care. Some of the basins had burst their metal-rung bindings, the slats buckled and split by ambitiously hungry roots which spilled out and sought the earth through cracks in the balcony’s stone. One plant was well-trimmed, its pot shining purple with a band of marigold. It had heavy winking petals and a sweet-musky perfume. A gift from Isabella. The rest was a tangled bank of green, a low wall, making this place private, a grove amid Kirkwall’s pave and dust. Fenris went to a bench strangled by creeping tendrils, gemmed with tiny curls of budding leaves and cracked, like a long-forgotten ruin. His heart felt no call to run to wild - it was half-mad already - but as he turned his head in the moonlight, his eyes caught green fire. 

The night air fogged around him. Sunset gave little relief: the buildings soaked up heat all day, and let it vent back onto the streets all night, where it hung motionless and sticky. Fenris looked out over the city, the boxy rise of neighboring mansions, and the empty place where the chantry once stood proud.

Hawke was braced in the door frame, hands grasping loosely at the stone casing above his head. “How’s the view?”

The chantry used to cast its shadow on the balcony; now the sharp, glassy moonlight poured over them, over Hawke’s face with its thin film of sweat, and Fenris’s cold stare and ever-burning skin. Every line and shape, the new clarity gave a bright shine to the balcony’s broken tiles, imparted a ghostly glow to new leaves and lyrium veins. “Different.”

Hawke let his hands slip from the door’s casing at the confession. He came over, but the resistance between them was still strong, Fenris’s pride was still up in arms. Hawke traced his slender shoulders with a glance. A book lay forgotten on the bench. Its pages were starting to curl in the humid air, and he picked it up curiously. It was a chantry tract. A righteous and angry one, by the looks of it. _The Sins of Magisters_. 

A few minutes perusing the first page, and Hawke let it fall back onto the bench. It just missed and slid to the ground, pages splayed. “Try some of Varric’s work. You won’t look so sour.”

Fenris gave a melodic little snort. “Hm.” He tried to ignore the tall man at his shoulder. “You taught me to read more than the page.” No one who could read ever looked at a book the same as one who could not - well, Fenris had learned to look at Hawke, too. He had read the deep unhappiness in Hawke’s house and heart. He was still beastly, too, could turn his snout - and fangs - to seeking and tearing. Rip away Hawke’s flesh and there was something else, something bloodthirsty and obsessed. Not love, but akin. An _instinct_ , for the mage that Fenris so hated. 

“What about my other lessons?” Hawke asked quietly.

The ones he taught by example. To be merciless, to forget. To build. To take. Shut up the past in its mirror-hall box, lock it with a living, willing moment. The past was dead, and so were its sovereigns. A sudden image of Anders, blond-haired, wan-faced, his high forehead and infuriating nose - Fenris had always hated his nose most, more than his absurd plank of a chin and pig-eyed glare. So snide, so - 

Hawke touched the elf’s cheek. Fenris’s head jerked away, cold like a lizard. Hawke tried again, insistent, and this time Fenris let Hawke’s fingers curl under his jaw.

“The past is a prison. It’s no place to make a home.”

Not the barest breeze. It was Hawke speaking, his breath tickling Fenris’s lips. A sting of alcohol came with his words. His armor was draped on him, the buckles were done up. Just enough to make Fenris’s quick fingers work at it, to invite his hands to slip in against warm skin, get caught up against hard muscles and the quick pulse of his blood. 

Fenris stared at the hollow of Hawke’s throat, feeling Hawke’s height and strength, the hand on his face. “I never understood what you saw in him.” 

“Indulgence.” The apple bobbed beneath his skin, piston-like, mechanical like those dwarven contraptions, wind-up things without hearts. 

“That’s all you have to say for yourself?” Fenris asked. _Seven years_ he had watched them...

“It’s done.” Hawke’s thumb lingered, amber-gold tracing the silver scars that framed the elf’s chin. “I’m free.” 

For Hawke, freedom was having empty hands: open to grab and take. 

Fenris resisted. “Your mage has only been dead a fortnight.” He wouldn’t have Hawke while he was slave to wine and grief. He wanted them to be better than that.

A flicker, a pause. The press of Hawke’s fingers grew tighter. “You’ve spent years sulking. Now I offer you want you want. So tell me: have you learned anything?”

It was a war Fenris was still fighting. A hill he would die upon. The part of him that had grown calloused in his chains, and yet was so sensitive, raw to the slightest pull. Always a slave... and Hawke, such a natural master. 

Fenris tilted his face to Hawke and his hunger, baring soft lips that had lost their snarl.


	11. Part Two: Chapter Two

Another melting hot day. The Keep was full of nobles in puffy vermilion and purple sleeves. To take off the brocade and silk was unthinkable, rather than let neighbors glimpse bare sleeves they perspired until they wilted their stiff collars. A whole crowd of them milling around the Viscount’s office, tapping their knees or coughing their affected little coughs as they eyed Hawke’s firmly sealed door. Their collars were sagging and soggy, but they had pride keeping their backs straight.

Or maybe it was the sticks up their behinds, Varric thought, putting a glove to his smooth chin thoughtfully. A whole arse-stabbing forest of them. He slouched on a bench, ankles crossed, a heavy gold pendant twirling between his knuckles and a half-dreaming look on his face. The noblemen paid no attention to the gold-drenched dwarf from Lowtown, too engrossed in their smalltalk -- _Warm, isn’t it?_ ; _A bit warm, yes_ as the sweat ran down their backs and collected in their nobly clenched bumcracks.

Varric snorted aloud. He drew a few looks and frowns, and smiled disarmingly. Nothing to see here, guv’nors, just a bit of rough from the low side of town. Before the phalanx of condescension could form up Hawke’s door opened, and like a whole colony of prairie hounds everyone swivelled their heads.

Knight-Commander Cullen emerged, moving like a scolded cat. There was an undignified jostle for a place near the door, while Cullen slunk past with a distracted stare and a slight frown. Varric watched him clack across the tiles, and saw three noblemen, who had been lingering at the edge of the throng, catch him in conversation. They made a small clutch around the Knight-Commander, tripping his momentum with words Varric couldn’t catch. One took Cullen by the elbow.

The one at their head was tall, straight, smooth, princely. Bred for beauty and honor. Eyes like iced-over pools, and surely there was a line of thick-gilt portraits down an ancient hall that shone with dabs of that same color, or nearly - artist’s approximation of the Maker’s inspiration. His eyes swept across the crowd, and then he turned and followed his cronies and Cullen down the stairs.

Varric was up on his stout legs, pondering as he elbowed up to the front of the small herd. The aide-de-camp entrenched by the Viscount’s door gave him a quick nod. Varric simpered sweetly at the deflating, wilting noblemen. He’d outbid them. 

Viscount Hawke was behind his desk like an archer at the battlements, keeping a wary vigil on the open patch of floor in front of the door. His gold-trimmed cloak was draped over his shoulder despite the heat, with the small, round, silver crest of office over his heart like a shield. He had the look of a man besieged. His face was wooden; not even the sight of an ally was reason to smile. Not when a thousand enemies lurked just beyond. 

“Careful, Hawke,” Varric said, “Your face will stay that way.”

Hawke’s teeth flashed. “Varric.”

Varric sat and kicked one ankle up over his knee. “You’re a hit. Five sovereigns to jump the queue. I’m only used to paying one.” 

Hawke was usually willing to weather Varric’s playfulness, but not today. “What do you need, Varric?”

Touchy-pants. “Just thought a friend would be happy to see me. Who’s our blue-eyed boy?” Varric asked, shifting the subject with a lurch. 

Hawke glanced at the door over Varric’s shoulder. He tried to look easy, sure, nonchalant. “I’ll find out.” 

“Maybe he’s just arrived,” Varric agreed, in to save face before there was an embarrassed silence. (He hated those.) The nobles hadn’t changed tacks. They slipped a leash quickly around any Viscount, and Hawke, despite his gnawing and growls, hadn’t yet chewed free. The oldest of tricks: keep the outsider under siege in his own office while they worked feverishly among themselves. Power was like lightning, nobility was the rod. It ran to them, from them, through them, and not even Hawke’s fierce energy was enough to draw it to himself. He was going about it wrong, too. Varric could see that. Hawke was Hawke. His sword and fury had served him well in the field, but this was a gentleman’s game.

Fierce energy, at the moment, was a misnomer. Hawke looked extinguished. He had relaxed a little in Varric’s presence, he was slumped against the back of his chair and was throwing thirsty glances at the empty carafe of water sitting on the desk. The gruffness was gone. “If you hear anything...” 

“Sure, Hawke. So, about you and our angsty elf...” 

* * * 

Night followed day, as it will (even in Kirkwall), but without the common decency to be any cooler. A single set of windows blazed in the Gallows’ tall walls. The officer’s mess was bright and loud even at this hour, the flickering cards and wine-blushed glasses were a blokish escape from a silence that was heavy with summer and anger. The mages were crowded in a single dorm for safekeeping, and they lay twitching on their cots in the stifling dark, falling still as death when the night watch went by. 

A knock on his door around midnight dragged Cullen out of that particular kind of not-sleep, the limbo where the mind tosses and turns, billowing with a sudden anxiety and falling slack with exhaustion, like a sail running before a storm. He heard the knock and for a moment he stayed absolutely still, too tired to face it. What _now_? 

The knock came again, light but insistent, and Cullen levered up on his elbow. “Come in.”

In came a young templar, one of Meredith’s last recruits, low in the pecking order and still very much the officers’ message boy. “One of the apprentices broke curfew. Ser Ashe has him in your office.” 

“I’ll be a moment.”

The door closed respectfully. Cullen lurched to his feet, caught his own glance in the mirror, and frowned. Something, a shadow of something, flickered across his mind and just out of his grasp, like a word on the tip of the tongue. 

He hadn’t shed his clothes, hot as it was, and it took him a short moment to clasp the binds of his armor. Ser Ashe was one of Meredith’s best, a favored son - meaning he was a bully. Cullen didn’t like him, but Cullen needed him. Maker, if the little rats would just _behave_ , men like Ashe would get bored of this and go back to their farms to whip horses. 

At his office, Cullen squared his tired shoulders and opened the door. He kept his gaze in front of him like a lance, balanced, determined to look the part of Knight-Commander. He took in the apprentice, seated in a chair in front of his desk, wearing a sullen, pinched look. 

Cullen wanted to grab the boy, take him by the shoulders and shake him. They were in this together - was he too stupid to see? Their grip was slipping. The Circle, the Chantry, his own authority in this place. And what was waiting if it all fell apart?

He turned, hoping that the boy wouldn’t see he was empty. His armor, his mantle, the sternness; all a goldleaf facade that would crumble if he had to take another step.

The apprentice was a skinny boy, a stiff jumble of sharp knees and elbows in a robe that was too short at the wrists and shins. Angry grey eyes glimmered from under his wheat-gold fringe. He was ramrod straight in the chair with Ser Ashe’s hand gripping his shoulder. The boy turned his head to glare at the fingers bruising him. If he had fangs, Cullen realized. He’d strike, sink them in, let the venom flow.

Cullen recognized him. One of the troublesome apprentices, dragged before Orsino more than once. Orsino had taken a shine to him. He would.

“Ruve, isn’t it?” Cullen asked gruffly. Meredith had taken notice of him, too, in her own way. Her desk drawers had been full of … papers. Letters to the Grand Cleric, other templar commanders, Orlais. Lists of apprentices too young for Tranquility, but condemned all the same. They went back _years_. Some apprentices she had marked out the day they arrived. Her madness had been blazing with heat and light, her men had been willfully blind. Cullen was left to shovel these things into oblivion, Meredith’s cracked sanity and the suffering of children - already dead and gone, so many of them - he couldn’t do anything for them now but turn the dirt over, smother any lingering embers.

The boy was sulky and silent, content to glower while Cullen’s gaze went far away. Ser Ashe was less patient, and flexed his strong fingers around the boy’s collar with its bow of narrow bone. Ruve squirmed.

“We caught him listening at the door of the officer’s mess,” Ser Ashe said.

With a quick, hard blink, Cullen pulled himself back. “What were you hoping to hear?” he asked.

Ruve sank in on himself, folding up like a paper crane.

Cullen rapped ten fingertips on the desk. “Breaking curfew isn’t light business.”

Ruve tucked his chin firmly, staring at his lap, his hands bunched white around the knuckles. Some boyish loyalty, to his friends or perhaps just to himself.

Ashe boxed the side of his head, snapping his thick hand over the shell of the boy’s ear. “Look at the Knight-Commander when he’s talking.”

“None of that,” Cullen said quickly. It was the Viscount’s mercy in his voice. The little snake looked at him, quick and scared with the blood rushing to his cheek and ear, going angry red from the templar’s blow. A glimmer of tears flashed at Cullen.

Cullen felt monstrous, suddenly, the whole thing felt monstrous, everything about mages and templars, these small creatures cowering as he and his men stomped by. He made a fist as Meredith’s voice came from memory to his living ears. The moment they were soft, the moment they were lulled... No more. That was the old way. Cullen was desperate to stop the fear, to stop them all being _afraid_. “Go back to your bed. Go to sleep.”

Ser Ashe interrupted. “Just like that? Ser Cullen, we’ve just seen - Orsino - who knows what he was up to?”

Cullen lashed Ser Ashe with a hard look, cracking the chain of command without a word. “Maybe he wanted a snack.” Cullen looked across the desk and smiled, inviting one from the boy. 

It was like running nose-first into a wall. Not a hint of trust, nor a hope of quarter in the boy’s still-furious eyes.

Cullen’s impulse to be kind went cool, the aftertaste was suddenly sour. They _must not_ fear each other. Cullen forced himself to speak kindly again. “Go on, Ruve.”

Ruve wrench himself free from Ser Ashe and twisted onto his feet. He stood still for a moment, looking from one to the other. He was sure it was a trick or a test, but whatever the game, he was already caught. He took a step toward the door.

No hand on his shoulder, no boot to the knee. Another few steps, and the doorknob was in his hand. The door opened -- no magical seal, no shock, no fist in the face. He pulled it wide and glanced at the templars again.

Ser Ashe started to follow, but Cullen stopped him with a quick word. He swallowed every instinct, meeting the boy’s suspicious glare with as much friendliness as he could muster. “It’s all right. He knows the way.”

The boy slipped into the hall and vanished like a ghost.

* * *

Hightown was warm like smouldering ash. A bright crescent moon made the thick, humid air hazy, and in Hawke’s bedroom, the single candle’s flame was absolutely still. The bed’s coverlet had been kicked away, balled in a heap on the floor, and Hawke lay naked on the sheets. Sweat crawled from his hairline and he spread his toes to feel the warm lick of air between them. He felt every quiet corner of the house, empty save for the Viscount’s guard detail, a single one of Aveline’s men who stood in shifts at the front door. The long morning and afternoon stretched in his memory, and tomorrow’s full block of appointments promised to be hell. His decision wouldn’t stay quiet, even if he could trust the clerks, the aides, the small politicians who lived in the Keep’s walls like termites. And he couldn’t. 

His forefinger and thumb had black ink stains. His hand had been shaking as he signed the stay of execution. He had spilled a jet-black puddle of ink on the table and smudged the decree with his fingerprints. But it was done. Anders was alive somewhere in that blank, forbidding Gallows, and Hawke’s signature would see he stayed that way. 

If he lived. _If_. Cullen thought it could only be a demon’s power keeping him breathing. No man should have survived the wound, a sucking chest wound that had run with blood and now with rank yellow. Fever had set in. 

Hawke couldn’t sign away that danger, and he found himself wishing -- 

He was breathing raggedly in the silence. The house was empty, but the emptiness had a _sound_ , a maddening just-inaudible drone that kept him awake and his brain on fire. The pillows were all on the floor where he didn’t have to smell them. His eyes were blurry with tears. He wasn’t himself. He was tired. Life usually passed in an easy, sardonic blur -- but the past week he had been more girl than man, ready to weep at the sight of a kitten. (He had seen a kitten on the street. A cart had caught its leg, or someone had kicked it, a little stray thing hobbling along - he had shut his bedroom door and cried.) And he was angry. His fuse was never very long but now it seemed all the fun had gone out of life: people he didn’t quite see as people used to amuse him, now, every time he saw another noble nose poke around his door, he wanted to smash it in. 

He tried not to think of Anders lying bloody on the steps, looking at Hawke like he had met his judgment. But he was tired, and hurting, and it was so bloody _quiet_. 

He rolled onto his back and groaned as his insides resettled. More sweat on his chest and face, and he put a rubbing hand to his belly. A gentle burn, like the heaviness of a full bladder. He put an ink-stained fingertip to the soft rim of his navel. 

Outside, a stray cloud slipped over the silver moon, sending a quick shadow and then a flood of light against the windowpane. Hawke caught it out of the corner of his eye, the silvery flash was like Fenris, and he scrambled up. Maker, Andraste’s tits, he was almost sick. His head seemed to swell two sizes, his vision retreated down a tunnel, and his stomach flopped like a beached fish. He grabbed for the ceramic bowl at the bedside, closed his eyes, and breathed. 

Fenris. As distractions went, Hawke had had better. But the fiendish want in the elf, once Hawke had torn his clothes and defenses aside, the way he became meek as a kitten - _damn_ kittens, Hawke thought, and would have laughed at himself if his eyes hadn’t been stinging again. 

Hawke wiped his wrist over his mouth. He turned his head carefully to look out the window, toward the looming block-shadow of the tower. 

* * *

“I couldn’t guarantee his safety.” Aveline shook her head. “I trust my men. But who knows, Hawke?”

They were in the library. Aveline leaned against the wide banister of the stairs, watching Hawke move between the shelves on the upper landing. They had been exchanging small pleasantries, strained. Now that their talk got serious, she straightened up and joined Hawke.

Hawke’s fingertips traced the hewn tops of some damn book or another. Hawke bought them because the shelves had been almost empty, and Anders had taken to this room like a fish in a little aquarium. Hawke used to lounge in the deep armchair, watching Anders go round and round, circling along the shelves. He liked sorting through the crates of books Hawke had shipped to Kirkwall, finding the gems, the rarities. Whatever caught Anders’s eye, Hawke couldn’t see it. Rows and rows of dead dry paper. “What if he received the Viscount’s pardon?”

“You can’t be serious.”

“I am. Does the Viscount have that sort of power?” Hawke was at the shelf, and yanked Aveline’s long-ago gift, _The Laws of Kirkwall_ , out by the wedge of its binding. He hefted the book in his hand - he had never read it - and looked at Aveline. “Well?”

“Theoretically.” Clipped, accurate caution. “The highest civil authority rests with you. Executions. Pardons. But Kirkwall authority doesn’t extend to the Circle.”

Hawke smirked, quick as lightning, as his mind flashed to Knight-Commander Cullen in his tower across the bay. He was as much a prisoner as the apprentices. The man had aged. _Years_ had come to him in the last few weeks. New-set lines at the corners of his mouth, dim anxiety in his eyes, uncertainty and strain in his step and smile. They were caught in the same crucible, the same crush of time and worry. But Hawke was the stronger. He held the man’s tether, he could press the Viscount’s word across that ring of algae green and summer-stinking water.

Hawke curled his thumb against the book’s stiff leather hide. Anders was there, too, under lock and key and injury he probably wouldn’t survive. But Hawke had stayed his execution all the same. “If he lives.”

“If he lives,” Aveline agreed. She lived and breathed the law and its order. She was ever-alert to trouble, even the far-off, unlikely sort, and shook her head again. “Where would he go? If you release him, he’ll be dead the moment my men turn their backs. Maybe it’s kinder, Hawke. Maybe it’s kinder if...” The kinder thing was not always easiest to say.

Hawke opened the book in his hands, half expecting a copy of that damned manifesto to spring out. Nothing. They used to show up everywhere. He must have gathered them up. Tried to erase himself.

Bastard. He wouldn’t get away that easily.

Hawke snapped the book shut and smiled for Aveline. “Thank you, Captain. I’ll let you get back to your duties.”

* * *

Fenris padded along the Hightown street. The sun was setting, signalling the changing of the guard -- noblemen by day, dames by night, and the Blooming Rose’s pink glow was like the rush of blood to a lover’s cheek, a sign of life in the maze of prim, marble-grey streets.

Fenris himself was no lover, not by nature, not by learning. The slight bob in his step became more pronounced as he quickened his pace. He was anxious, like a sailor adrift in uncharted terrain as he stepped across the familiar square. Varric had given him good advice, between friendly jabs: it was best to go to Hawke with purpose. Hawke wasn’t one for cute or coy. 

Hawke had a chair arranged in front of the hearth in the library, sitting with his back to the door and the red-eyed mabari at his feet. He was slouched against the left arm of the chair, his cheek resting on his closed fist and a glass of dark wine in his other hand, its base balanced on his knee. He was still as a statue, gazing straight into the fire’s dance, in the little grove of light spilling from the fireplace. The mabari’s thick flank was heaving with steady breaths. 

Fenris didn’t pause. He needed momentum - the first few steps from his badly-hung front door had been hard going. He had talked himself into motion, into courage; he couldn’t come to rest. He took a few quick steps toward Hawke’s chair, into the undergrowth, toward the impenetrable grove of Hawke’s thoughts. 

Hawke sensed Fenris and tipped his head. “Hello.” Just hello. 

Fenris came to a stop. The tangle and vines were too thick. “Hawke.”

“That’s my name.” Hawke parried the rough reach of Fenris’s voice with the edge of a sneer. 

The elf, uncertain enough, felt the bulwark of rebuke and his heart quickened. Confusion stung as Hawke sat motionless. He had come as willing prey and Hawke was like a bored, sated cat before the fire. Fenris tried again: “I’ve been thinking of you.”

“Good of you,” Hawke said dismissively.

Fenris’s heart shrivelled. “I thought you would come again.” 

He had prayed Hawke would come again. Their dalliance had made for a strange night, and an even stranger morning. Waking beside Hawke. Waking, for the first time, with a rush of love, instead of a rush of hate. That little sprig of joy was withering in Hawke’s silence, dying where he stood. He was a fool, he had seen something that wasn’t there. Perhaps he was wrong about it all. He had been alone all along. Perhaps Hawke had been a warm dream. His shoulders shrunk.

“Did Varric send you?” Hawke asked. 

“I came because I wanted to.” And he had been a fool. “I’ll bother you no more.” 

Another martyr, Hawke thought, and his skin crawled. Was he so dangerous? So frightening? Why did they love him and make ready to die? 

Hawke sloshed the thick wine in his glass, watched it cling and run down the squat bowl. “You haven’t heard.”

“Heard?” Fenris asked guardedly.

Hawke took a measured breath. Measuring his own commitment to this madness, and a glance out of the corner of his eye at Fenris and the furies he was about to unleash. “He’s alive.”

“Who?” Fenris asked. They both knew, but Fenris wanted him to say it, because it would hurt. Inside, where Hawke was soft and warm and slick. Fenris wanted him to say it, even if it was a razor down his own belly, pain that ran through his skin and left him empty and cold.

“Anders.”

“You knew, when you came to me. You knew he lived.” 

“Yes.” 

“You let me believe -” Fenris could find no words. He was flickering, phasing, felt like murder, the hopeless murderous rage that had been his other half for so long, that had finally gone to rest, back and bright, roaring like a foundry. “You let me _believe_.”

Hawke didn’t move, hunched in his chair with his broad shoulder to the elf’s anger. “Leave, Fenris. Don’t come again.”

Fenris snarled, whirling mid-prowl. “Take your mage back, and may he be the death of you.”

The words echoed long after the slam of the door as Hawke’s fingers toyed nervously with the knot of his belt.

* * *

Outbid again. Varric sauntered past the grumbling nobles. Wasn’t it too bad their money was all in cushions and paintings and precious silver cow creamers, instead of those thin little disc shapes that went easily from pocket to pocket? 

Hawke didn’t stand up when Varric entered. He had a cloak on, even in this weather, draped over his shoulder and across his lap, draped like velvet on marble. Probably hiding a new set of knives, a crossbow - never trust men who didn’t dress for the weather. 

“Nobles keeping you busy?” Varric asked. Hawke was sweating like he’d been caught in a rainstorm. The cloak was thin, but in this heat it didn’t make a difference. 

Hawke’s desk was cluttered with books. Thick, official-looking tomes. Varric could see the gaping space on the shelf where they had been. The powers of Kirkwall enumerated, set down for the ages, the rules, the principles of the machine. Hawke had tried his way, smashing against the edifice like a battering ram; now that that had failed, he was settling in for a running battle. Sniping through loopholes, digging trenches along this or that line of regulations. 

He looked like an officer just given a messy field promotion, like a blast-shocked lieutenant who’d just had to stop and scrape his commander’s kidney off his boots. 

“They all want to get up on their hind legs. Trot in and tell me how to do my job.” Hawke stabbed his quill into his inkpot. 

Varric shrugged. “They’re the rich: highly sexed, well fed, and extremely bored. They’ve got nothing to do but play politics. Like our choir boy from Starkhaven. Minus the sex.”

“And the riches, presumably.” It was an acrobatic marvel, the way Varric always kept both ears to the ground. He’d sent along a full report not a day after their last meeting. Choir Boy: exiled prince, a Brother of the Chantry, come to cast his blue eyes on the wreckage of Kirkwall and shepherd justice and righteousness in their wounded hour. Hawke hadn’t met the man, that was a pleasure still to come. “I’ll show them who runs this city.” Hawke’s hollow, hooded eyes fixed on an invisible enemy. A whole host of them, judging by the way his stare roved. 

“What do they want?” Varric casually picked up the stone pitcher of beer. Still full. The carafe of water was almost empty.

Hawke was still sizing up their forces. “Public Tranquility, followed by public execution. Just to make absolutely sure.”

Varric set the pitcher down with a thud, and his heels followed it onto the edge of the desk. “It’s been a while since Kirkwall’s had a good hanging.”

Hawke snapped back to himself and smirked. “Good?”

“Good for business. Sell a lot of pies. Everyone likes an execution,” Varric lilted, waving the toe of his boot in time to the cheerful beat of an inaudible drum.

Hawke looked at the friendly intrusion of Varric’s soles, still smiling grimly. The boots always stayed as clean as the dwarf’s hands. “I’ve stayed his execution. And more. I’m having him released.”

It’d be a piss-poor storyteller who was left speechless by a plot twist, but Varric’s toes stopped swaying. A rare serious look crossed his face. “Is that a good idea? I didn’t come here to say ‘I told you so’, but if you need it, Hawke -”

“I don’t,” Hawke said sharply. 

“I’m just saying, Hawke. History has a nasty habit. It repeats itself. I liked it better when you were putting this behind you.”

“I have my reasons.” 

Recovered, Varric’s voice didn’t miss a cheerful beat. “That’s what I’m afraid of.”

* * *

_The Gallows_

Cullen, a templar at attention, and a cramped, too-warm office. He had one of the Viscount’s official communiques in his hand, arrived last week. Ser Bydel, her whole body rigidly at attention, was in front of his desk. “We’re not to silence them as punishment. You know that. Why did you do it?”

“She could have hurt someone.” 

“But she didn’t, did she?”

“She set her bedding on fire. I wasn’t about to let her try it on me.” 

Cullen rubbed his forehead, dug his thumb and index finger into his pounding temples. “The Viscount says -”

At those words, Ser Bydel’s lips went white with pressed-in fury. 

Cullen cast his eyes down. He shared some of her anger. The Viscount was molding them into a flock of mother hens. _The Viscount wants us to stop the lessons, the Viscount wants them fed_ three _times a day, the Viscount doesn’t want to see any bruises_. The men resented it, resented _him_ , Cullen, for slipping the kid gloves over their gauntlets. Even those who had flinched when Meredith gave her sane orders were sneering at the Viscount’s coddling.

“Where is she now?” Cullen asked. 

“Third-floor pantry. Since we’re not allowed to put them in the cells anymore. _Ser._ ” 

Cullen stood. “I’ll go and -”

The door opened. It was Cullen’s adjunct, rushing like a leaf flying before a hurricane. “Viscount Hawke has arrived, ser.”

“Here?” Cullen ignored Ser Bydel’s clenching fist. “What does he want?”

“To see the prisoner.”

Cullen startled. “How would he -” Cullen remembered, before he looked any more the fool, the _other_ prisoner. “Dismissed,” he snapped at Bydel. 

Viscount Hawke himself swept in, almost running her over in the doorway. “How’s the prisoner?”

Cullen answered quickly, like a shopkeeper with a good handle on his stock. “A few of the older apprentices have been trying their hands at healing. He was still breathing this morning.” 

“I need to ask him a few questions.”

“I’m... I’m not sure he’s up for it. Surely, Ser Hawke, you could have sent word. There was no need for you to come and...” _make me look like a gelding_.

“Show me,” Hawke ordered, ignoring him.

They went down. Down many flights of stairs which turned narrower, darker, colder, as they descended into the chilly earth. They came to a small room, one of the oldest parts of the Gallows. A rickety table and long-forgotten chair sat there, and several lit lanterns hung on hooks on the wall. It was the final stop on the way to those cells, the ones that had wards woven around them like cages, carved into the living stone long ago, and sealed with blood. The only place to hold a dangerous charge like a possessed mage.

“This way.” Cullen nodded toward the hallway as he took a lantern from its hook on the bare wall. “And mind the shadows. We’re still securing the lower basements, old partitions...” He was tired, he chattered when he was tired. “The apprentices are in the east wing. We lost good men, but with the reinforcements from Starkhaven, we’ve enough eyes and ears to keep them in line.”

“Do you let them out?” Hawke asked, as the row of cramped cells scrolled past. Tiny, dripping rooms, runoff from the upper privies, if his nose was right.

“Out where?” Cullen asked distractedly.

“Outside. In the sun.”

“We’re not ready to go back to physical training. It’s not safe. There’s not much else we can do, without instructors to teach them... We put them back at their books.” Cullen’s wide shoulders shrugged. Most of them sat and stared at their workbooks, pencils in hand, and the pages stayed empty. Those first few days they had been grateful for their lives, obedient. Now the cycle of resistance was beginning again. Cullen rolled his shoulder. His back was a mass of knots, a vein in his brain stung and throbbed with every heartbeat.

The shadows felt thick, heavy, and Hawke hated this place. “They’re children. They need to play outside.”

“Play?” Cullen echoed, repeating the syllable slowly, like it was something new. They got no further in their argument, because Cullen brought them to a short halt. 

They stood in front of an occupied cell. It stank of a sickroom, and Hawke, who had prepared himself for the worst, had to breathe through his teeth. 

Anders was on a cot, naked limbs looking white, blue, and skeletal. His hair was lank and oily, tangled in thick strands on the stained mattress. Hawke wanted to rip off his own cloak to cover him - the nakedness was the worst, to see his stark ribs and hip bones, the utter stillness of his sunken chest. 

“Open the cell.”

“Ser Hawke, asking questions now would be useless -”

Hawke spoke softly. “I’m releasing him.”

Cullen momentarily forgot both himself and Ser Hawke’s mantle, with the key frozen half-turn in the lock. “You don’t mean it.” 

“Nobody thinks I’m serious,” Hawke mock-groused. He was staring through the bars. “I’m ordering you to release him. To me.”

Cullen weighed the lock on his palm. It was almost as large as his fist, warded, lyrium-imbued, a lock that couldn’t be forced nor picked. “I can’t agree to this.”

“I’m not asking you to agree.” 

“Viscount, it’s madness. When you refused to sign the order of execution, I objected, but this... This is too much. Too far.” Cullen had learned the dangers of teeth-gritted fealty, the high wages of silence. “If he regains his strength, no human will be able to control him.”

Hawke’s eyes flashed, tasting something long-forgotten. He turned to Ser Cullen, face to face, toe to toe. “Open the cell.”

Hawke was the stronger man. Some deep animal instinct in Cullen knew it, flinched under Hawke’s stare, and the bold spell was broken. Cullen twisted the key in the lock.

Anders was scooped off the cot, draped in white like something sanctified, and brought to Hawke’s house.

* * *

_Return_

Anders drifted in the void. Voices came to him, little moments of awareness slipped along the fragile threads of his thoughts like beads. Sometimes they were too heavy, the gossamer strings snapped, and he went back into nothing.

Slowly, though, the world rebuilt itself around him. Like the first brief, undecided lines on a page, the blank white nothing took on the hint of shape. The heavy, dead veil began to thin. Sounds and smells penetrated, pain and thirst woke him. Light and shadow shaded in the walls of a small room and the posts of a bed, stretching up beyond his dim sight’s reach, like stout pillars holding up an immense grey-black sky.

For a long time, days, every breath was a fight. He was drowning, he was at the bottom of a pool of water, pinned by something stuck fast between his ribs. He lay out like a corpse, staring at the sunless sky above, as his lungs worked laboriously through the shard of pain staked through him. Something inside, ripped apart, was trying to heal. He understood, but sometimes he didn’t, and he clawed weakly at the bandages until someone’s hands - he never knew whose, many different hands, rough, big, small, smooth - held his wrists tight.

His ribcage was a crushing bind. He breathed lightly. Too big a breath, and that awful pain cut off his air, left him silently screaming, his mouth wide open and his lips turning blue.

He was alone. Justice’s grip on him was shaken loose by the brush with mortality. (More than a brush: it was life that had left the barest trace in Anders’s body; he had all but gone over to death, his blood had smeared Hawke’s sword tip to hilt.) He was free of Justice’s shadow, for the moment, bobbing in the light. Justice wasn’t gone, but he had settled like grit to the bottom of a basin. Anders’s thoughts - when they came to him - were his own. Clear.

The sun rose and set. How many times, Anders couldn’t know. Finally, though, the shadowy, faceless, nameless visitors and their hands came less frequently, the pain became something smaller, something he could breathe around, and he was left, more often than not, alone.

He spent days on his back before he felt strong enough to sit up. He pulled himself up slowly, feeling the sharp tug of healing wounds inside and out, the press and pull of tightly-cinched bandages, and sat back against the headboard to catch his breath. His arms were, for the moment, too heavy to lift, and his wrists lay crossed in front of him. They were shrunken, bundles of smooth bone wrapped in paper-thin skin. His hands were little skeleton-puppets, narrow, twig-like bones and knobbed knuckles. Stunted and chipped nails, dried-black blood crusted under them. After a moment, he gathered his strength and touched his face, his cheeks, feeling the contours of the grinning skull inside. He must look like a corpse. He looked up, but the walls were empty. There was no mirror to see the horror.

He took in the room for the first time. A small, square space, with a door set into the corner to his right, and two high and narrow windows on the wall to his left. The windows were bare, no curtains to smother the afternoon sun that skimmed in, tempered with approaching evening shadow. No tapestries. Anders could see the places on the wall where they had hung, and recognized the hints: it was the same stripping-down they used in the tower. Stop a mage hanging themselves. The windows were bolted over with new bars, slim, graceful, yet with obvious purpose. His body wouldn’t fit through, even if he managed to shatter the glass behind them. Nothing to pry them loose with. The furniture had been pared down, nothing small or easy to shift.

The room was warded, too. He tried a spell, but it wasn’t just his bone-deep weakness that made it fumble, snuffed out the spark so it fell lifeless from his fingertips. He dropped his head into his hands. He’d been here before.

Suicide watch. Funny, he thought to himself, and his cracked lips twisted. Funny how the harder they tried to stop you, the harder you were driven to succeed.

But he wasn’t in the tower. This was Hawke’s house. Hawke would come soon, he was sure of it. And then... he didn’t know what Hawke had in store, but Hawke wasn’t a man for patience. He would come. 

He sat and thought of death for an hour or more - he had stopped tracking the sun, he didn’t care - when the door swung open quietly. Orana, all meekness, came in with a tray in her hands.

“Master Anders.”

Anders blinked. Of all people - what was this? 

“Is Hawke here.” A rattle from a tomb. His chest burned.

The bowl and spoon jumped on the tray as the skittish elf-servant set them on the bed. “No,” she squeaked. 

“Where is he?” No stronger, no more alive.

“He’s gone out.” Her voice wavered. 

Anders glared at the mousy little elf as she backed away. 

So it went. He fell back into the void, slept for hours or days. Orana kept to her duties, bringing trays with fatty cuts of meat, dense bread, and always one of his favorites - just-ripe Ferelden blood oranges, hard-pitted cherries from Orlais, pastry with sugar crust and tart jam. He refused it all. He swallowed water, but the food he would not touch.

He got stronger. Sometimes when she came he was on his feet, and she was afraid to enter the room. She put the tray on the floor and backed out. She never said a word off script, no matter how he growled at her.. “He’s not home.” “He’s gone out.” “There’s no one in.” All while her big eyes panicked and her hands shook. 

Anders sat during her long absences and did violence in his thoughts. He thought of trapping her, grabbing her tiny wrists and pointed chin and hurting until she answered. She was the only one who came, but he decided there were others, just out of sight beyond the door. How many, he couldn’t guess. But they made her lie - she didn’t have it in her to lie on her own - and she was as frightened of them as she was of him. 

Fellow prisoners fall into camaraderie or enmity, either test out their chains together or tear each other to pieces. Anders went on dreaming of hurting her, she went on leaving his tray by the door and collecting it again untouched.

When he could no longer stand the endless procession of days, of Orana’s coming and going and no Hawke, he waited behind the door. It opened outward, and he stood beside the jamb, waiting. Orana opened it at her usual time - the time when the shadow of the bars across the window lay halfway between the bed and the wall - and saw the empty room. She froze, her green eyes became huge, her powdered lips parted in surprise, and he saw the goosebumps roll over her skin. She heard him breathe.

She turned and he lunged at her. He was still weak and clumsy and she screamed, throwing the tray in a panic. She wasn’t aiming to hurt him (she wasn’t aiming at all). The tray caught him by sheer luck, struck him in the face and chest and made him stumble. She didn’t wait to see if it landed, she fled with another yell. 

He dropped and sat breathless, head spinning, and his chest burning. Some delicate binding inside had worked loose. He half expected the door to open again, for templars to come. He had decided, somewhere in the last weeks, that Meredith herself must be sitting just on the other side. He waited, but none came. His legs went numb long before he felt strong enough to stand, and so he sat on the stone floor as the shadows inched toward him. An hour, two, three, before he at last dragged himself to the bed. The madness had gone, the stabbing pain of blood returning to his deadened legs cleared his head. 

He had behaved like a beast. That poor girl, she must be beside herself.

At the dinner hour, not a moment soon or late, the door opened. It was Varric. 

The first really familiar face since... A moment of awareness. The room stunk. Lunch - a stew - was greyish and greasy on the floor. He was half-naked, wearing a dirty, sweat-stained smock that barely reached his knees. He should be ashamed; he wasn’t. He didn’t shrink from Varric’s look or Varric’s smile.

As if nothing had happened, he smiled and stepped nonchalantly over the mess.“You’re looking well for a dead... man-demon... thing.” His nose twitched, the only sign that anything was amiss.

Anders crossed his wasted arms. “Did Hawke send you?” 

“Why would you think that?” Varric rubbed his chin, shook his blunt head. “I’m not his enforcer, Blondie. Orana came to see me. It’s not nice, terrifying a sweet girl like that.”

“I’m sorry.” Anders got to his feet unsteadily. His legs held, and he took an experimental few steps to the window. “He’s here, isn’t he?” Anders asked tensely. “Why hasn’t he come? Where’s Hawke?”

“Blondie, why don’t you relax.” Varric smiled. 

“How can I?” Anders wrapped his fingers around one of the window’s bars and tugged fruitlessly, and he turned away and swept his eyes over the rest of the room. “I’ve been here for weeks. I’m a prisoner and -”

“For your own _protection_ , I’m sure.”

Anders closed his mouth. Varric’s smile wasn’t as friendly as of old. Whatever that meant. Varric was friend to all. Anders was just another stray come to lap at the generous saucer of milk on the dwarf’s doorstep. He’d never been invited in. Not like Hawke, Fenris... the rest of them. He’d mistaken table scraps for a banquet. Friendliness for friendship. Smiles for sincerity.

Varric’s grin still beamed like sun bouncing off a blank wall. “Hawke’s a busy man. He’s the Viscount, you know.”

“How would I know?” Anders snapped. He went listlessly to the window. He saw the drooping, exhausted banners on the neighboring mansion, frayed and sun-bleached. If he craned his head he could almost just see the street below.

Laying the cards neatly on the table, still with his bright croupier smile. “Hawke’s burned through a lot of goodwill lately. Don’t make it worse for him.”

“What's it got to do with you?” Anders demanded.

“Just some friendly advice.” Varric hooked his thumbs in his belt. “I don’t like seeing girls cry. Don’t pull the scary possessed act anymore, all right?”

Anders wheeled around to look out the window. “All right.” He gazed at the drawn curtains of the house across the street, the banners just below the window. His thoughts slipped away and he stood at the window shrunken and silent. When the bright light faded and he turned around, Varric was gone.

* * *

_Repurpose_

He slept sitting up against the headboard because it helped his lungs stay clear. He pulled the sheet from the bed up around himself. The fever that still hadn’t left him, and even in the muggy summer heat it made him sweat and shiver. Orana hadn’t returned, not to try to tempt him with supper, nor to bring the candle that she placed in his room for the sunless hours. It was like going slowly blind as the sun set. No moon. He nodded off in total darkness.

He woke himself by coughing, bringing up something thick and copper-tasting. His back was sore from being wedged against the headboard, his head swam, but worse was the wet weight in his chest. He coughed again, miserably, whining through his teeth. It felt like something behind his breastbone had torn open. He tried to breathe lightly, bracing his ribcage with a hand as it swelled and shrunk.

“Awake?”

His eyes opened. “Hawke?”

Hawke made a sound in his throat, rustling in the chair by the bedside.

Anders would have met Hawke on his feet, face to face, but his body wouldn’t move. He was cramped and so _cold_ , it was like he was naked, like the sheet wasn’t there at all. But he dragged his head up defiantly, glaring at Hawke through the oily curtain of his hair. He couldn’t quite make Hawke out in the dark, only the gauzy shimmer of Hawke’s silken shirt. Hawke sat in the chair with the candlelight pooled shallowly at his feet and his elbows on his knees. 

Anders craned his head away and wiped his mouth with the sheet, leaving a dark-tinged smear.

Hawke watched his every move. “Anything you need?”

Anders shook his head mutely, once.

“Tell me. Bodahn and Sandal are gone.” Hawke heard the silence rushing in at them again, as Anders stared hatefully at the wall. “They went to Orlais.”

Anders didn’t move. What did he care? He wanted to know only one thing. Anger ground like a rusty bit between his teeth. “Why am I here.”

“Because I’m the only one in Kirkwall who can save you.”

“I. don’t. want. to. be. saved.” Pain and breathlessness made his words distinct.

Hawke didn’t reply. He shifted in the chair, slouching backwards in his white blouse, an elbow on each armrest. The fingers of his left hand, tented against the chair’s arm, struck an impatient beat.

Anders gave him a slow, hateful look, curling his lip. Regal like a lord on his throne, self-righteous and... Something in his eyes caught Anders, called out to him, unsettled him, demanded him to _look harder_.

The shadows were wrapped strangely around Hawke’s body. The tight-fitted shirt clung to his skin, rounded against his lap. The buttons down his front were strained. Anders’s eyebrows screwed together. “What...” and then an oath, by Andraste’s blood and tits and ashes. “ _Maker_.”

Hawke rapped his fingers again. “I still need your help.”


	12. Chapter 12

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings: Suicide ideation, non-con imagery.

When Anders woke in the daylight, he felt a flood of relief. He could see, and the nightmares that had dogged him faded. He peeled the clammy sheet away from his skin for air. His sleep was a patchwork of dark things, shrieks of trapped and hungry spirits, whispers in tongues he couldn’t understand, wolfish templar grins. These things had followed him since he was small, since drinking of the cup at Vigil’s Keep. In the midst of that was a nightmarishly clear spell, not the confused echoes of darkspawn or injustice. He had dreamt that Hawke had finally come to him. But he had been different, not the Hawke Anders had known. Hiding his anger, speaking steadily, looking softer and almost human in a candle’s small light. A vision of what Anders wished Hawke could be, maybe. A glimpse of hope, come to taunt him. 

And more. Hawke with a small, swollen belly, just showing, out of notches on his belt and forced to leave it aside. 

It was a cruel and strange thing to dream. Had he wanted a child? Had he wanted, really, to be a father? He waited for the answer. 

No sound except his own worried, confused thoughts. 

He wasn’t used to his thoughts being his own. He wasn’t used to an idea, from first to last, rolling through his head without Justice grabbing the reins. For ten years what _he_ wanted had scarcely mattered. Justice’s will was stronger, brighter, the easy answer. He didn’t have to think.

Maybe what he had really wanted was a tool, something to leverage against Hawke, to set Hawke between his fellow mages and templar might. The dream of Hawke was a mind-trick, either of a demon or his own weak and riven heart.

It was done, it was all done. Anders swallowed the bitterness down, let the dream dissolve in the acid of waking pain. 

He looked at the four bare walls. Prison. Until he found a way out. Through hunger, to waste quietly away until one day he was still and transparent like glass. Or until someone - Orana, if she came back - if he behaved, some day someone would get careless, bring a glass bowl instead of wood. A second to smash it, a few seconds more to slice through the blue chains running down his pale wrists. There would be nothing they could do once he had broken those running red locks. That gave him comfort, gave him the will to move from under the sweat-damp sheet. 

He sat up, clawed away the sheet from his neck and shoulders, and turned his face toward the sun shining in the windows. He would make a show of it. Sit quietly, contemplate what he had done, make obvious penance. If Orana came, he would apologize. He would fool them.

His feet touched the floor and stuck there as if frozen. Hawke's burned-down candle, the wick drowned in its own wax, still sat beside the chair’s leg.

* * *

Varric tromped up the wide steps toward the Viscount’s Keep. There should be some kind of pulley system, he decided, to haul people topside. Old people, infirm people, people with short legs. And the weather needed to change, yesterday. He was running out of words for it. There were only so many ways to put a poetic spin on “It was hot.” 

_Balls_ hot.

The hall outside Hawke’s office was less crowded. That might suggest the fervor had died down - that Hawke had settled in, taken the reins. All it meant, Varric suspected, was that the cabals had retired someplace more comfortable.

“Varric. Unexpected. Still mad at me?” 

It was hard to think of him mad at anybody. Varric was too much a storyteller. There was indulgence, eternal bemusement, in seeing it all. The whole messy chain from the smallest, meanest motives to the grandest bright passions, the pebbles that started landslides, the whispers that became solemn chants to the Maker. He was too busy hiding a knowing smile to get really, properly angry.

“You know me, Hawke. I don’t get mad.” The question of _instead_ hung in the air, the kind of unsaid that made lesser men wince and worry. 

Hawke just smiled. “What can I do for you?”

“Take off that armor. I’m melting just looking at you.”

Hawke’s posture was tired, slumped forward against his breastplate. He dragged himself up straighter, propping himself with an elbow that sunk into the mess of paperwork spread on the desktop.

“Some personal business, Hawke. Orana’s been hanging around The Hanging Man. She wants another job. She’s terrified of Blondie. Can you blame her?”

Hawke looked at Varric askance. “Since when are you steward of my house, Varric?”

Varric’s eyebrows twitched. He made himself available, that was the secret of his influence. Everyone came, everyone talked. He saw and heard it all. He had time for the little people and the big wigs (but, as a rule, he liked the little people a lot better). “You’ve been hiding behind your paperwork. I guess she figures I’m the next best thing.”

Hawke nodded, making peace with a shrug of his hands. “All right. If you find her something, I’ll give her a shining reference. Anything else?” The I’m-a-busy-man tightness crept back into his voice. 

“You’ve got a bigger problem, Hawke. Choir Boy’s been tugging old family ties.” 

“He’s not even reclaimed his seat at Starkhaven yet. Why’s he wasting his time here?”

“Nobody in Starkhaven’s murdered a Grand Cleric lately.” 

“Oh right,” Hawke said. “I had forgotten.” He stared at Varric deadpan, pricking the dire little atmosphere with a pin.

Varric shook his head fondly. If Hawke could still laugh about it, maybe there was hope.

Hawke turned through the papers on his desk. A lot of condescending, angry missives, and not one invitation among them. This time last year he had been snowed under with invites. “So that’s why Lord and Lady Guillam haven’t invited me to dine lately? Too busy toasting their brother in umbrage.”

“The thing about nobles, whether they’re in Orlais, or Ferelden, or Starkhaven, is they’re all one big happy family.”

“Literally,” Hawke said dismissively. 

Varric liked a leavening joke. “They’ve all got one stashed in their attic: the uncle who’s seven feet tall, no chin, twelve toes.” 

They shared a companionable snort.

“Point is, Hawke, he can do a lot of groundwork here.”

Hawke set the papers aside breezily. “I’m seeing him tomorrow. I’ll take care of it.” A quick clip of his wings, and, if the man rubbed him the wrong way, maybe a bit more - though if Choir Boy had actually taken the vow of chastity, maybe he wouldn’t miss them. 

Varric frowned at the look of quiet glee on Hawke’s face. “Remember he’s a prince. He doesn’t have to play top trumps. He’s already won.”

* * *

Anders was still dazed when Orana came with breakfast. He broke his hunger strike mechanically, tearing into an orange and eating some spoonfuls of spiced oatmeal, drinking all of the water and a few swallows of too-hot tea. He got bored of it quickly, eating; his teeth grinding away, his throat swallowing - he hadn’t shaken the unreality of it all. Being alive. Even the simple act of eating was strange. After breakfast he sat and thought of Hawke. 

Some sins, it seemed, endured beyond the grave. 

Orana didn’t return with lunch or supper. No one came, in fact, and by nightfall he was going mad with impatience. How could Hawke go back to ignoring him after _that_? After he had said those things? His mind wouldn’t let go of that image of Hawke, and his confession - _I need your help_. 

The sun had set when he was certain, dead certain, that he heard a voice outside the door. He flew to the door and listened, his mind still full of Hawke and a need, like the need to breathe, to see him. 

For a long time he waited with odd, animal resignation. A scrap of voice, and nothing but silence. Had he imagined that, too? Like the vision of Hawke, or dream, whatever it was. In sheer desperation, he made a fist and slammed it into the door. 

The door sprung on its hinges, swinging in a smooth, smart arc. It hadn’t been locked.

Anders froze, struck dumb, as the draft of freedom washed over him.

He hadn’t a candle, and the hall’s low lanterns were enough to almost blind him. He stood blinking in the light. 

A table with an arrangement of flowers was against one wall. A dark strip of carpet was laid down the middle of the floor stones, running straight from his door to where the hall joined the main hall of the house. There was a layer of quiet dust on the table, making its shiny marble top dull and speckly. The portraits and art on the walls were muted with a layer of dust, too.

The place looked and felt deserted. Anders made himself brave and took a step out of the door. The way was clear. The wards had gone, and the wardens, too, if there had ever been any. 

His mind sprinted down the hall, skidded down the stairs, and rushed for the cellars and the ladder down to Darktown. He could disappear. Maybe. Go someplace and not screw it up this time - maybe. 

He thought of Hawke and the child, and that stopped his heart. This was no escape attempt. He needed to see Hawke, badly. And the door hadn’t been locked. Orana’s forgetfulness? She was bloody terrified of him, she wouldn’t forget.

Anders went to the room they shared, every step expecting a ward to spring, a magical trap, for someone to notice, to round the corner and come face to face with the hulking mabari. But the house was empty, silent. 

Maybe Hawke was waiting. It would be just like him, to let Anders rot in a prison of his own making, wait until the end of time - if that’s what it took - for him to be brave enough to open the Maker-damned door. 

He should have felt something as he approached Hawke’s bedroom. He couldn’t count the times had been dragged in, smiling despite himself, or the times they had fought and he had stormed out. But he couldn’t shake the disconnect, the sense that this all belonged to a different Anders, the one who had stood on the steps of Templar Hall and waited for Hawke to bring him death. He was curious, otherwise numb, as he pushed open the bedroom door.

Hawke liked to work in his room sometimes, at the table, rather than down in the library. Hawke might be within; if not, he would find other answers. 

* * * 

Hawke let himself in. The two guardsmen - three now, he realized, which meant Aveline had heard whispers of unrest - gave him only mostly-sardonic salutes. He moved as quickly as he could up the stairs to the armory. His armor was so tight, but it was all he was sure hid the... bulge.

Hawke glanced down the hall and stopped short. The door of Anders’s room sat wide open. 

* * * 

Anders looked for the calendar first. Hawke kept it on a nail on the inside of his wardrobe, a habit he had picked up as a Ferelden soldier. Anders pried open the door. The wardrobe had the feel of a soldier’s trunk - everything very neat, very compact. Anders looked at the calendar blankly, but Hawke didn’t check off days and it was useless to him. He couldn’t guess at the day, even the month - had been unmoored from mortal time for so long. 

A lower drawer hung an inch ajar, stuffed full of papers. Anders, on impulse, pulled the drawer open and got down on his knees. 

Legal documents, Varric’s signatures on a few, dry, dull. He brushed these aside like dead leaves and kept digging. Under a spare shirt, he found another a set of slim volumes. They were held tightly together with dark red ribbon, and he brought them out of the drawer’s shadow. The gold of the binding caught the light, and the Chantry’s seal blazed on the top cover. He slipped off the maroon ribbon and shuffled the books in his hands.

_Physical and Psychical Limits of Moral Sovereignty in the Mage_. He bristled, felt red anger, almost threw it aside. But if this was the sort of crap Hawke was loading into his brain, Anders needed to know. It smelled like the books in the tower, the official catechisms printed with the Chantry’s bombastic ink and thick-matted paper. The same nasty smell from the words, too.

_Dear Sisters, Daughters, Faithful, Those Who Suffer and Those Who Rejoice... the wisdom of many lives... the humility of those who do the Maker’s will..._ He skimmed the usual gorge-rising pomp, the twee circle-jerk of Andrastian kowtowing. Hawke must have, too, as the pages were pristine. (Or perhaps he just wasn’t one to doodle, not like Anders, who couldn’t leave a naked margin. He had spent hours at his “studies”, peopling the empty side-streets of pages with cats, balls of yarn, his fellow apprentices, ugly gargoyles wearing Templar sigils. Little messages about the present, for the future. A secret, spirited code of mage brotherhood to run down the ages.)

A few pages into the tract, he reached the first bookmark. It was a feather, about three inches long, light gray and tattered at the edges. Anders held it between thumb and forefinger by its narrow, needle-like bone. It quaked with his breath. It was one from his ugly, molting robe. He flicked it away, angry without knowing quite why, and went back to the page.

_In an early part of this chapter, it was stated that mages are considered capable of rational and honourable inducement; and though we believe fear has a considerable place in the production of that restraint, the desire of esteem is considered as operating, in general, almost as powerfully. This principle in the mind, which doubtless influences our general manners in a great degree, is found to have great influence even over the conduct and resolve of the mage._

_Though it has obviously not been sufficiently powerful to enable them entirely to resist the strong irregular tendencies of their condition, when properly cultivated, it leads many mages to struggle to conceal and seek to overcome their morbid propensities; and assists them in confining their deviations within such bounds as may not make them obnoxious to the family._

Hawke had drawn a rough, heavy line under the last words.

Anders glanced at the other books. _The Tenure of Kings and Magisters_. _On Apostasy and Integration_.

This last one stopped him. It looked like most of Hawke’s attention had been here as well; several bookmarks sliced the block of pages. 

He opened the volume, went to its first page. The name of its author, the place of printing, Val Royeaux, the Chantry’s seal. He traced the emblazoned mark with his fingertips. Imprimi potest.

“Looking for something?” Hawke’s voice asked coolly. 

Anders couldn’t dredge up even a healthy startle. Shame had become a thing of the past, shame and pretense. They had bled out of him. “What are these?” Anders demanded, rising from his knees and turning to face Hawke. He let the wardrobe door hang open.

“What do they look like?” Hawke shot back.

“They’re...” They were insulting, they spoke of mages as if of dim children, the arguments were uncertain and weak, like a foal’s first steps. But they were also a glimmer of light, a crack through close-set prison bars. “They’re about life outside the Circle. Life for mages.” Anders set them aside except the one in his hands, fingers still touching that raised, golden seal. “This is the Chantry’s imprimatur. Why would the Chantry -?”

“Healthy intellectual debate,” Hawke said derisively. “They’re prohibited, now. Since your little stunt. Inimical to the faith. Reading them can lead a soul to mortal error. Apparently.” 

“But you read them,” Anders said, confused.

“Yes.”

The tip of Anders’s tongue nervously touched his teeth. “Why?”

“Because we killed children in their beds.”

The words were quick, but heavy as lead. They weighed in the silence that followed - the silence of having too much to say, and no way to begin. 

“Was I dreaming?” Anders asked finally, looking at Hawke carefully. Hawke was in a loose, formless shirt, one that hid his waist.

“No.” Hawke moved. Anders saw the feather on the floor near Hawke’s feet. 

Hawke stepped closer and it whirled away, off to some dark corner. Anders tensed as Hawke drew near, but Hawke was blind to him.

Hawke stepped around Anders and went to work straightening the bank statements, the scrolls lined with columns of credit and interest, the thick bundle of contract copies. When he was finished, he shoved the drawer closed with his foot, straightened and stretched his shoulders. 

“I’m going to sleep,” Hawke said. “Get out.”

Anders glanced down at the bright crimson book in his hands. Hawke saw it, of course he did, but he ignored it. He nodded at the door in his commanding way. Anders, with no firm answers but clutching his unexpected prize, went willingly back to his cell.

* * *

_Tomorrow_

He wasn’t sweating. That was Hawke’s first impression. Vael’s neat hairline was free of the damp constantly beading on Hawke’s brow and the man’s face, smooth as new vellum, had no trace of heated shine. He spoke with an inland lilt wedded to the gilt-edged vowels of the aristocracy – at least compared to the pig-grunts of his countrymen. He may have stuck out among Kirkwall’s elite, but there was nothing rough in his speech or manner. Even the pious insolence with which he strode in and greeted Hawke was clean and precise. His fury - and he was furious - simmered rather than boiled.

So this was the once and future prince, a chaste Brother of the Chantry and husband of Andraste in her heaven, come with fire in his eyes to meddle in the affairs of mortals. 

Hawke had cinched his armor uncomfortably tight, so his back was straight and the rest of him trim.

Hawke charged, just as Sebastian had finished lying through his teeth about what an honor, a pleasure it was to stand before the Viscount. He struck at the wound already bleeding. “Why are you still here, Brother? There’s no Chantry for you to pray in any more.”

“You know why I’m here.”

“To help with the relief efforts. We’re _so_ appreciative,” Hawke said.

Sebastian had prepared for an earnest game, so the flippancy caught him off-guard. It pushed him into a bit of extemporizing. “You stood strong during the mages’ revolt...”

Hawke caught a whiff of blood. It came to him without warning since the Rite: a hot, musty, coppery smell suddenly filled his nostrils and turned his stomach, brought out a new sheet of sweat on his body.

Vael had recovered his angry momentum. “But I know you shield the maleficarum.” A jitter of fury. “And believe me, I will not rest until he is brought to justice.”

Hawke’s lips twitched at the unfortunate word. He looked the man over, wrapped in white and silver symbols of his faith, and harried by some zealous hounds that made him quiver. Vael had the mirrored mind of the fanatic, he was guarding himself against something. Hawke had taken up and put down his share of ideas - he recognized the believing fervor that drowned out doubt. There had been a time when his faith was new and uncertain, like a just-frozen pond, and Sebastian would never let himself go back.

Sebastian was still on his feet, poised as only an archer or a dancer stands, light and perfectly balanced on long legs. “The woman who usurped my family was in thrall to a demon,” he said, in that holy tone of voice - _I see your guilt, I know your sins_. “You have the same look - you think you’re still the master, but you’re being lead by the nose. What has he promised? How did he snare you?” Sebastian’s gaze searched him, peeling aside the gruffness that couldn't phase a man born and bred to be a lord.

Hawke felt every inch of the shell of his armor and the damp rag of his shirt sticking to his skin. His guts were roiling as if they held something alive. Fluttering like a shoal of fish or flock of small birds, or a crab trapped in a small bucket. Hawke’s attention wavered and turned inward. The strange light swishes and jabs almost tickled, and made him feel suddenly queasy. 

Crossed swords rang and scraped in their locked stares, testing each other’s strength without words. Hawke was sure they had never met, but there was something _familiar_ about him. Not just the off-hand confidence which was ever nobleman’s birthright, his straight back and a tongue that clattered against a silver spoon. It was deep, the sort of thing Hawke’s shrouded, unconscious mind noticed long before the growl of his conscious thoughts. The prince of Starkhaven, beautiful and intense like a cut gem, hummed with the same pitch and chord that had strummed behind Meredith’s mad eyes. The darkness had many faces. Hawke’s scalp and skin crawled.

Sebastian sensed the battle was done. “Send me away if you will. But I’ll return, and when I come for the abomination, I will cleanse this city with steel and the Maker’s own fire.”

“That sounds like a declaration of war.” Hawke was chilled to the bone, but he rallied, made another clumsy swipe at this icy shard of a prince. “Hard to do without an army, I’d think.”

Sebastian’s perfect lips smiled. He didn’t have to speak. Sebastian’s skin was pale and perfect as a million stainless white banners, the Templars’ sigil shining like his eyes, his heart was the thud of boots set in exalted march. He was cast beyond all reason, on some shimmering shore where the sand ran crimson with blood. Hawke could read the dreamy visions and heard, distantly, the clash of arms.

Feeling like he had lost ground he hadn’t even known was contested, Hawke gathered his retreat. “You aren’t welcome in my city. Leave.”

Taking him literally, or simply bored of words when he had the Maker and his faith, Sebastian made a tight little bow from the middle and turned on his heel.

Hawke collected himself for a minute, pinching the bridge of his nose and waiting for the weird motion in his stomach to fade. Then he hurled himself out of the chair, around the desk, and yelled for his aide to send someone from the Guard.

Aveline herself reported, hoping Hawke would appreciate a friendly face. Hawke didn’t smile. He saw only her rank, her captaincy of _his_ Guard. “See that Vael leaves by sundown,” he snarled.

“What’s going on, Hawke?” Her men didn’t usually frog-march Brothers of the Chantry from Kirkwall. At long last the Guard had space to breathe without the Templar Order standing on their necks, but this new Kirkwall - the way the nobles whispered, the tension on the streets – in some ways, she liked it even less than the old.

Hawke sliced the air with one hand, signaling her to get on with it, and turned his back on her.

* * *

Almost midnight, by the moon. An hour after Anders had heard Hawke’s booted feet on the stairs and the distant slam of his bedroom door. (Hawke came home late and left early. Fourteen hour days, reinventing the office of Viscount after three years of it lying fallow at Meredith’s command.)

Anders had tried to sleep, but his body was achey, he was hot, and his skin was grimy, crawling with unseen things. Tracks of sweat crept from his temples, the nape of his neck, leaving snail trails of stickiness down his face and back.

Without a knock, Anders opened the door of Hawke’s bedroom. Dog lay on the floor at the foot of the bed. He put his head up with unfriendly swiftness, scenting Anders and giving a deep, warning huff.

“Oh, shut up,” Anders snapped. His joints felt as weak and loose as the badly-hung door in his hand.

“You’re getting bold,” Hawke said wryly. He was seated at the corner table, working by candlelight. He rustled papers as Anders came into the room, piling unread budgets atop whatever had been in his hands. He had a silver bowl of cherries beside him, plump hearts that glistened like dark rubies. He picked one by its slender stem and let it twist. His white teeth sunk into the thick red flesh. “I’ll have to put the dog on your door.”

The air was hot and humid as a bathhouse, and for some reason Anders’s feet were cold. His shirt was damp through and had gone yellow at the armpits with old sweat. “I want to bathe.”

“About time,” Hawke replied. He had smelled Anders almost as soon as the mabari.

“Did you burn my things? I didn’t find them in the rag cupboard.” Petulant.

“Everything’s where you left it.”

Anders’s defensiveness deflated into uneasiness, confusion, but he was too hot and stinking and tired to face it. He looked warily at the dog. Its red eyes followed him as he moved to the wardrobe that had been his.

He opened the doors. The shirts still hung on their hooks, as if not a day had passed. Mother’s pillow, safe and sound. The sight of it made him feel something, and anything was too much. He slammed the wardrobe door and kept his hand against it, as if the demons inside might push back. “Tell me: am I your prisoner?”

“You’re free to go whenever you like. You know where I keep the hand-coin.”

“I wouldn’t last a moment out there.”

“I know.” Hawke set aside the paperwork and dragged the candle closer. He cupped his hand around it and dipped a finger toward the flame. He let the small tongue of orange lick at his calloused fingertip. He stared into the dancing fire, reliving the afternoon’s interview with Sebastian. _How did he snare you?_ “I almost believed you when you said it was an accident. I see, now. You did this so I would protect you.”

Anders’s skeletal hand made a fist. “No.” He had little enough innocence to profess, but in this, at least, he was honorable. “We saw the blood, we assumed. You wouldn’t let me be sure.”

“You left,” Hawke said.

Anders hated him because he was right. He should have been sure. He should have fought both of them, Hawke and Justice, to be sure. He had been wrong, or he had been right, but only half – twins ran in Hawke’s family - if there were two, perhaps one died while the other lived. Perhaps it had only been a bloodletting after all. Perhaps… It didn’t matter; they would never know. 

Hawke watched the flame dance.“My father trapped my mother the same way. Once there was a babe, what could she do?”

That, at last, made Anders turn. Hawke’s constant pricking, his disdain for someone Anders so admired, finally reached a nerve. Maybe the last twitching nerve left in him. “That babe was _you_! You really think you’re so wrong? That you shouldn’t be here at all? I cannot understand -” He was afraid he would never understand. Hawke had brought him back to this place, and he was afraid they would go round and round forever. 

Well, he refused. He was direct. “I don’t want it any more than you.” He didn’t want to be bound to Hawke by blood or money or love. He wanted to go away and die.

He glanced at Hawke, regretted it, poison welled up in his voice again. “So do what you like. It’s a matter for knives, now, but don’t let that stop you. It’s the child of a mage, it doesn’t deserve any better.” An angry breath. “I don’t know what you’re waiting for. It may be a mage itself. Enough of those have died at your hand.”

He lapsed back into numbness, abandoning the argument and the look on Hawke’s face and whatever was making his chest hurt. He gathered up a pair of socks and some smallclothes and left Hawke to his papers. 

* * *

The Chantry’s book was a short volume, but the most dangerous charges often had short fuses. Anders read it cover to cover and back again, all day, and often through the night hours, until his dripping candle wore down to nothing and he plunged, mid-sentence, into darkness. Even then he lined up the words in his mind - he had all but memorized them - laying them out like blocks, stepping stones.

They were things _he_ could have written, or so he flattered himself.

How far had Hawke traveled down this road? Had he turned back before the end? He had tried for years to make Hawke see. Why now, why only when it was too late?

It was deep night and he was back in the third chapter, a strange, tangled section that went into the thicket of theodicy and didn’t, for all Anders could tell, manage to come out again. He was fighting the ache of head and following the argument’s leap down a steep bank when the window rattled with the force of someone’s fist.

Anders jumped a mile, upsetting the candle set close by his elbow. He snapped his head toward the bars. The candle rolled off the table and went out.

In the blackened room, he could see through the bare glass. Something dark as sin was in front of the stars, billowing beyond the city’s lit facade. A massive thunderhead had reared, marching west across the Free Marches, and as he watched the first sparks of white fire crackled in its angry furnace. A crash of thunder rolled across the city and the stone walls trembled. Vanguard winds swept across Hightown’s proud face, rattling panes of glass in their old frames.

Anders clutched his knees, fighting off a chill. He willed himself calm. A storm. Only a late summer storm. He had loved them as a child, the cloud-tide visible for miles over the steppes. Warm rain on his skin, his mother in front of the fire. He shut his eyes and dropped into sleep.

Outside, the storm amassed like an army. Kirkwall changed by violence – winter to summer, summer to fall, rulers, religions, law. None went without a fight. The sky became a churned, bloodied field, ragged clouds sundered by spears of light, like the nightmare-miasma that rose out of Anders’s tainted blood. They came as he slept: dragons, Darkspawn, evils forgotten by ordinary men. The archdemon, a skybound forge of fire, with wings of flame and blood running out of its beating heart. He twitched in his sleep, sweated, cried out in terror.

He opened his eyes, still in sleep. Justice was on the bed before him, not a hair’s breadth distant. He touched Anders like a lover, but so cold. Anders twisted in the blankets and shivered.

Eager for the coupling, Justice was calling to him, and when Anders refused, shaking his head madly and trying to back away, he grew angry. He would take Anders by force if he had to; he grabbed Anders’s ankles, wrenching him down the bed. Anders’s own hands were heavy as stone, fastened together above his head as he struggled. Justice, a Templar, Hawke loomed. They were all one to Anders, naked and held fast while the tears streamed. He trembled and struggled but the cold hands ran up his thighs and down, bracing under his knees and forcing them up and apart. Once let in, Justice could never be denied.

Anders felt Hawke’s silencing hand on his throat. It was swift. Hawke’s thick hardness filled him, with a surge of Justice’s violence. He saw the dead, grandmotherly face of the Grand Cleric and a babe, not more than a moon old, hacked to pieces and it had his eyes.

He thrashed and tumbled out of bed.

It was like a birth, he was soaked with his own sweat and sobbing like a newchild, slapped awake by the hard stone of the floor, cold and almost blind. He saw the sky tear itself apart and he staggered to his feet, to the door. All-consuming terror: if he looked back, Justice would be waiting.

He reached the safety of the hall, slamming the door behind him. The lanterns were out. He was still half asleep, swimming in fever. Another nightmare came. Dog. The mabari, the beast. Hawke said he would put him at the door - he’d meet the blaze-eyed dog in this black hallway and it would tear out his throat. Anders put a hand under his chin and his pulse drummed against it. He was barefoot and the pads of his feet itched and tingled with each twisted, bristling fiber of the carpet under his toes. He shrunk back to the door.

There; in a split second of white light. Something moved.

Ancient instincts curdled his blood, stiffened the hair on his arms and neck. The raw feeling of being stalked, eyes on him from the dark. Lightning flashed; was that the table or the mabari crouched and silent - he had caught a flash of white and grey, a table edge or snarling teeth? He hated dogs, hated them because he knew Templars used them. It was quicker than consulting their phylacteries once they had the scent - he tried a light spell, a feeble little orb that just made the shadows dance crazily as his head spun. His sight was blurry, he felt tears slip down his cheeks. He wrenched himself forward, the fear that had rooted him finally pushed him to save himself - he ran as thunder crashed, or maybe the dog leaping after him as he scrambled along the carpet that slipped under his feet. He landed on the floor, twisting madly, and gave a shriek as his hands skidded on rough stone and a swirl of air - spittle flying as fangs snapped shut, just missing his neck. His legs were dead with fear. His body fell like a lamed fawn’s, cold and beyond him except to curl up and wait for the weight of the animal and the hot crush of its jaws.

Nothing came. Wherever the mabari was lurking - probably sleeping on Hawke’s duvet, Anders suddenly thought, and the idea was enough to make him laugh, madly - laugh in the dark, huddled on the floor, his heart about to burst. Laughing his head off, while a part of him died - he hadn’t come back, not all of him, there was something _wrong_ -

“Anders?”

The fever-dreams cracked. He heard Hawke’s voice, seeking him down the dark hall. His mouth snapped shut, the laughter stopped. His head was wrapped in his arms, and he peeked through as a warmer glow filled the passageway. Hawke had set one of the lanterns alight.

Hawke stood at the end of the hall in a loose nightshirt that hung down to the knees of his white linen pants. He was never shirtless anymore, not even in the dead of night in heated weather. His hair was out of its tie, falling black against his white shirt collar. “What happened?”

Anders scrubbed at his face with a bare, knobby wrist. Dog was behind Hawke’s legs. Anders sat up, backing to the wall, scraping together anything that was left of his dignity. He ran the hem of his shirt through his fingertips, the little chain of stitches made a scratchy furrow on his skin. The friction took up his attention, helped him forget his running nose and eyes.

“What happened?” Hawke asked again. No answer. Dog stood at his side eagerly. Hawke touched his thick neck, the sleek velvet fur flat on his heavy skull, to keep him in place. Anders was a statue except for his fingers, plucking at his shirt. His mouth was moving silently, like one of those men who sat on the street talking to people they had made in their own minds. Hawke’s stomach was fluttering with that instinctive, animal distrust of the sick and broken. “Stop it.”

Anders fell still.

Hawke felt Dog’s ears perk under his hand. Hawke pressed him back, still staring at Anders. “Go to bed,” he ordered.

Anders gazed emptily at the carpet, his hands resting on his grubby nightshirt like dead things nestled on silk.

Hawke waited to be obeyed, looking hard at the broken man sitting on the carpet. Silence and seconds trickled by.

Hawke sent Dog away. He took a step toward the mage. His instinct was to grab Anders and shake him, snap him out of it with a blow. Hawke was a strong man, and those who have never had cause to doubt their own strength can’t stand weakness in others. Seeing Anders act so small made him furious. His palms curled into fists, ready to punish.

Anders looked up as his executioner stood over him, a look that declared defeat. He didn’t beg. He was sick. He was tired. He was so very tired – and with a start, he saw Hawke disrobed. For a moment all of the grief, the exhaustion, was reflected and writ large in Hawke’s resigned eyes.

Anders looked up at him and Hawke smelled blood.

Warm blood, that day in the bath when their child bled out of him. Hot blood on his sword the day of the Rite. Meredith had gone to work on the older mages, those who were more learned, more dangerous. Hawke had come upon a room of templars and apprentices who were little more than children. Some were on their beds, some had been playing a game of cards. A girl grabbed his knees. A templar dragged her off by the collar and his sword flashed. Hawke heard her shrieking even now, in the silence between the peals of thunder.

He got down beside Anders, shoulder to shoulder.

Anders spoke again. “I didn’t want to come back. I didn’t want you to save me.” The wall was chilly through his thin shirt and he shivered against it. His brain was staggering like a drunk down an alley, seeing this bit of memory and that... “I thought I would take care of you, for once. For a while.” His teeth chattered as he spoke, and Anders huddled himself toward some reserve of warmth that wasn’t there. He imagined Hawke’s look. Disbelief, a wry, dark eyebrow raised just a millimeter above the other, an almost-transparent sneer. _I thought I would take care of you, for once._

_I thought you would need me._

He couldn’t even care for himself. He was mendicant, coming apart at every seam. Anders listed so their bodies touched, his own slight and shivering form resting against Hawke’s steadfast shoulder.

Hawke pushed himself off the floor, and Anders slipped in empty space. But Hawke didn’t let Anders fall into that nothing. He held out his hand. “Come.”

“Where?”

“Bed.”

“With you?”

Hawke wrapped Ander’s clammy hand in his strong grip and pulled him to his feet.

* * *

Hawke banished Dog to some rug in the house and shut the door behind them. Orana refused to stay in the house after dark and Hawke wished for her. He could have used a folk nostrum. Just brushing against Anders he could feel the heat in him, a bad fever that radiated. Hawke poured a bowl of water for the bedside. He was no healer but he had been sick, once, when father was away. Mother had nursed him the ordinary way, with cool water and towels.

Hawke glanced at Anders, who was standing and swaying like one of the undead. His hair, never neat, was loose and wild. The chopped ends had started growing again. His nightshirt had stinking stains at the collar and under the arms. His bare feet were bluish, and his toes with their cracked, yellowed nails were curled against the cold stone floor. His eyes had the glint of fever, his cheeks were flushed, and his outline trembled. He startled as lightning lit up the room and thunder crashed on its heels.

“Come to bed.” Hawke pulled back the other side of the blankets.

Anders folded himself into the bed and lay on his back, unmoving, with the heavy covers weighing on his chest. He was rigid, laid out for the coffin. 

Hawke wrung out the rag and turned over to Anders, leaning close. He set the back of his hand on Anders’s face, cheekbones, forehead. Definitely fever. A chill or lurking infection, Hawke didn’t know which, but Anders was blazing warm. He traced Anders’s brows with the cloth and folded it against his head.

Tears glistened in Anders’s eyes, caught like small, shining gems in his lashes. Hawke used his thumb to wipe them away.

“We spared all we could,” Hawke murmured.

Anders shook his head weakly.

“The children. Those who asked for mercy.” He had put a stop to it after that second of horror. Not soon enough to save the girl.

“Stop,” Anders begged.

Hawke folded the cloth against Anders’s head and rolled onto his back. He grimaced as the new weight of his insides settled beneath his shirt.

More thunder, lightning, and Anders clawed after him, propelled by a sudden urge to hold or be held. He was shaking as the fever burned through him and Hawke wrapped him up close. He tucked Anders’s head under his chin and cradled his shoulder blades, stark as wings.

Anders put his cheek against Hawke’s shirt, and had a moment of clarity in the dark. “I’m going mad.”

Hawke’s arms tightened. “Sure that ship hasn’t already sailed?”

Anders sniffed, chuckled. “Help me, Hawke.”

“I don’t know how.”

Anders listened to Hawke’s heart and wiped away tears.

The solid weight of Anders’s head rested on his chest, his quietly-shaking shoulders were braced in Hawke’s arms, and suddenly Hawke felt a small and fussing motion inside. A turn or a kick made distinct little flutters. It whelmed him, swamping the last of Hawke’s strength. He held the weight of more than one life, he was carrying both of them. He was the shelter, for Anders who was fraught and mad and unraveling, and just for a moment, as he breathed in deeply, his middle stretched round and warm under the silk of his shirt. He shuddered at the sudden energy. It crashed over his head, leaving images in its wake of the things he had done. Death, fear, and those he had sent to the Maker. “No more. Anders. No more.”

It couldn’t be real. Some little detached tendril of Anders’s mind understood that this was fever. It was his brain burning itself up. This wasn’t Hawke with tears clogging his voice.

Hawke found the wet washcloth again and pressed it to the nape of Anders’s neck. He closed his eyes.


	13. Chapter 13

For a time, Anders winched and tossed in Hawke’s grip, by turns twisting away from him and coming back for warmth. He dragged off his sweat-soaked shirt, nearly incoherent. He tangled his arms and needed Hawke’s help. Hawke did what he could, made him drink cool water, kept a compress to his forehead when he would be still. It wasn’t much, but it was enough. The fever broke in the small hours. The sweating stopped, the restlessness faded, and Anders rested quietly in his arms. 

The storm brought a sudden cold wind, the first chilly trumpet of autumn, strong enough to slip around the creaky window frames and shudder the curtains. A cold breath reached Hawke’s feet, thrown out of the covers, and Anders burrowed closer as it caressed his bare back. Then the solid pillow and soft blanket got the best of Hawke, and the weary sentinel slept.

Some hours later, not enough to make him feel good, Hawke’s eyelids floated open. He took in Anders’s body lying close by. The storm had passed. The room was soundless but for their breathing; from outside, the hum of day was muffled by the thick drapes. Street sounds, a dim din of voices, the rolling rattle of a cart’s wheels across cobblestones. Well after dawn. He’d be missed at the Keep.

He didn’t care. Hawke wanted to go on sleeping, to turn his head into the pillow and forget that the sun had risen. He wanted Anders to stay just there. He dozed on, feeling Anders beside him, until Nature’s nagging call finally irritating him to full waking.

Hawke came back to bed and found Anders awake, his face buried in the pillow and watching him out of one eye. For once, it wasn’t like meeting a stranger. Their night-long embrace had woven a few delicate strands across the chasm. They could hear one another. They could talk.

They would, soon. Anders got into new clothes as Hawke grabbed a few oranges from the bowl on the table. His body was hungry, and Anders, who looked wasted away to nothing, needed to eat. Hawke tore into the waxy peel with his nails and a cloud of citrus puffed into the air.

When Anders had joined him on the bed and dismantled his own breakfast: “Thirty-six.”

“What?”

Hawke had the report on his desk in the Keep, enshrined in place of the bodies they couldn’t find. “The Grand Cleric. Nine priestesses. Six brothers. Apprentices, acolytes, men and women who had come to pray. Five children at their lessons. They were innocent.”

“Our dead could fill a thousand chantries.” Across Thedas, a million unmarked and unmourned graves. The Circle never forgot an apprentice, but there were no stones or carvings to commemorate their passing. Nothing but empty bunks, soon filled by the next scared child in chains. “They were _all_ innocent.”

“Are you?” Hawke asked. Not in judgment. That was done. He would hear Anders’s account of himself.

Anders thought for a while. He didn’t care about the silence as he tried to piece it all together - the fragments and half-memories, anger and fear. Was he innocent? The word might be meaningless. “There was Justice. He was in everything I said and felt and did.”

“And he made you do what you did.”

Maybe that was easier for Hawke to believe - that Anders was vanquished instead of willing. But it wasn’t true. Anders shook his head slowly. “I was there, too. Even if I don’t remember it... even if...” He looked at his hands. Justice’s hands. The same hands, stained.

“What _do_ you remember?” Hawke asked.

“Hating you.”

“Do you hate me now?”

Maker, it was so like Hawke. Nothing went untested - he would drag it all into the light. He thought that was truth. Anders sat cross-legged beside him, hands curled between his pale, bare thighs, one knee swollen and sore. He was in a clean but ratty night shirt. He looked like a monk of the wilds, a man who had renounced it all for his visions, the mad chattering of his soul. But Anders was emptier than the lightning-eyed seers who picked up their gnarled staves and strode toward the mountains to chew bitter roots. No fire, no certainty, no faith. Anders was a man returned; gone up to the mountaintop and beheld an empty heaven. Or worse, beheld... nothing. No saving illumination, no answers, nothing but the angry earth stretching out below.

No, there was no truth to find. Only him and Hawke, and regret. “How many mages did you kill that day?”

“We spared all we could.”

Anders’s face and fingers twitched. He screwed his eyes shut and turned his head away.

Hawke’s hand followed and touched the stark plane of his jaw. He didn’t press, didn’t try to turn Anders back to him. He touched and waited.

Anders spoke slowly. “I’ve been loving and hating you for so long, I don’t know if I can tell them apart.” Hawke’s fingers were burning against his pale cold cheek like a brand.

“Anders… maybe, if we’ve both done things we can’t forgive...” Hawke offered.

No. No, that was too easy. He couldn't leave it like that, call it even, let it all sink into the grave. Hawke had finally had his revelation, but that it had taken such _evil_ to move him... He glared at Hawke, and Hawke’s hand fell dead away. 

“No,” Anders said. He wouldn’t do it. Hawke was looking for something to take away his own hurt, the guilt of things he had done. He wouldn’t have it from Anders. Giving Hawke peace wasn’t his job, it wasn’t his responsibility. It wasn’t _fair_.

Hawke shrunk back, confused, hurting - and what was his pain compared to theirs? he realized, suddenly. What was his guilt? Nothing - _nothing_. It didn’t right the awful wrongs, give back all that had been taken. His guilt was nothing, meant nothing - Anders should have spit in his face.

Anders watched Hawke reel and heard glad whispers inside. He could hurt Hawke after all. He could show Hawke what it was like to be powerless and afraid and alone, to have the world deaf to your cries.

But as soon as it came, it was gone. Anders’s heart trembled. Maybe it was the natural rebound, or the way that between them hate and love were never far apart. It wasn’t Hawke that he hated. He hated Hawke’s willful obliviousness, his selfishness, his ignorance and easy cruelty. And he was watching it crumble before his eyes, as Hawke went sallow with realization and clumsily tried to defend himself from Anders’s hard stare.

It was finally Anders’s turn to ask the questions, to chase Hawke down, leave him nowhere to hide. The spirit of vengeance still lurked in him - he was compelled. Tear everything they had been apart, see what was left. “Did you love me?” Anders asked. “Even for a moment?”

If his voice cracked, it was understandable. Ten years was a long time to wonder. A long time to be unsure. And along the way there had been a lot of surrenders and a lot of defeats.

Hawke couldn’t abide the back foot for long. He placed his hand on Anders’s knee, the one that was always warm and aching. At his wince, Hawke moved it to the mattress beside Anders, leaning in. 

Anders met the near-contact with a pained look. Hawke’s deep brown eyes towed him in but Anders struggled against the current, unwilling to be swept away. He wanted to _hear_ it. “Did you love me?” he asked again, around the tightness in his throat.

“I did. I do.” Hawke touched Anders knee again, gently. “I love you. Maker, Anders, I didn’t sleep, I couldn’t think, I could barely breathe…”

Anders swallowed. “You’ll be the death of me.”

Hawke’s head shook vehemently, Anders fell silent, and Hawke touched their foreheads together. Anders closed his eyes as Hawke’s warmth swirled across his lips, and waited for the pressure of a kiss. Hawke would close that final breath of distance, and he would know whether he could bear to, whether… A heartbeat later, Hawke’s mouth met his.

They hung against one another, still and scarcely breathing. Anders wrapped his fingers in Hawke’s shirt, held on tight. Hawke brought his other hand to Anders’s jaw. There were tears on Anders’s ashen face, and a blue tinge to his thin lips. A delicate, grey, broken creature, like a spirit trapped this side of the Veil. Suffering. Hawke stroked his cheek comfortingly.

“I didn’t want to come back,” Anders said miserably, against Hawke’s hand. 

Hawke was near-shattered, too, nights and nights of sleepless waiting, weeks spent fighting the grinding eternal roaring Kirkwall machine, trying to scale the enormous blank walls that loomed everywhere he turned, trying to beat them down with nothing but his bloodied torn fists. The nobles were winning. He shook his head, moved again for Anders’s lips; if he was defeated, if they were doomed, he didn’t want to see it. He was desperate for strength, something to reignite the fire that had gone out. “Tell me what you want.”

Anders ducked his head. “I want you.”

Hawke’s hand slipped between Anders’s legs and Anders gasped, twisting Hawke’s shirt tighter between his fingers. Hawke felt him out where he was tucked into his grey nightshirt, and ran his fingers along the few inches of flesh that were anchored to nerves in his pelvis. They started to burn. It had been a long time for Anders, numbed by hopelessness and then by pain. The numbness started cracking as Hawke caressed him. His insides felt like they might shatter. He resisted. “ _Hawke._

The tiniest hint of frustration tightened the corners of Hawke’s eyes. He was burning, too, after weeks of starving for Anders. It was hard to think. If Anders didn’t want him, he would have to go away. He couldn’t trust himself.

Anders sensed Hawke about to pull away and he grasped Hawke’s hips, cradling the strong arches of bone through the folds of his shirt. His thumbs smoothed over Hawke’s warm middle, exploring the firm, low round of his belly. Hawke’s skin was the color of fertile earth, there was a deep glow in it, like the fire in his eyes. Anders traced the strong, corded line of Hawke’s neck to his thick collar bones. If he could stomach it, if he could force himself to be gentle… His mouth was dry. “I want to see our child.”

Hawke glanced down between them, at the roundness framed by Anders’s hands. His body had become unexpected, a little terrifying. The familiar was mixed with the strange: strange cravings, odd rhythms of tiredness, thirst. It was hard to live in it sometimes. But he had seen enough death, ended enough lives, to last the rest of his. “You will.”

And the promise made Anders feel… for the moment, anyway… safe. He breathed, he relaxed, and his hands moved from Hawke’s waist. They played over Hawke, up over the muscle-wrapped barrel of his ribs, brushing the stiffening nubs beneath Hawke’s shirt. Anders continued exploring, tickling at Hawke’s neck with his uneven fingernails and squeezing his heavy, wide shoulders. They were tense with want, and Anders touched his chest again. Flat sternum, muscle, a new layer of softness and the hard nipples that crowned against his fingers as he toyed with them. Small circles, delicate little pulls, enjoying the way Hawke’s breathing got heavier. Anders glanced down to see Hawke’s cock straining in his pants and felt his own answering rush of hot blood.

He grabbed at the hem of Hawke’s shirt, but Hawke shook his head, parried his hands away. He wasn’t quite ready to be bare, to let Anders see how he had changed. He kissed Anders, and as Anders wrapped his skinny arms around his shoulders Hawke felt how light he was, how emaciated, how wasted. Hawke put his mouth against the pulse in Anders’s neck and kissed it, thanking the Maker for that small beat of blood. He had his lover in his arms and loneliness, helplessness, lost their power. He sunk his hands into Anders’s waistband.

He pulled off Anders’s clothes, still kissing him against the pillows. Anders’s feet were on the mattress and his legs trustingly braced astride Hawke’s body.

Anders bit Hawke’s lower lip, kissed it, caught it between his teeth and broke off to gasp as Hawke took him in hand. That part of him that was pulsing too, like his throat, a swollen length and the sack drawing tight as Hawke weighed it on his palm. Hawke fondled Anders, used his thumb to gently roll his balls, and Anders’s legs trembled. Hawke clasped his hand around Anders and pulled, rubbing him up and down. Anders’s hips bucked, he couldn’t help himself. It had been so long -

Hawke looked across Anders’s body, from the desperate flesh in his hand, his wasted, flat stomach, to the sharp edge of his ribs. He touched the scar just to the right of his sternum. Jagged, bare, grotesquely smooth. It had been a fatal blow, but he could feel Anders’s heart surging against his clasped hand. He ran Anders through his hand again, a tight, hot squeeze that almost finished him, leaving off before the final tug that would have sent Anders over the edge. He licked his lips, shot Anders a joyful look, and sank on his elbows.

Anders moaned as Hawke’s mouth wrapped around him. His breath was ragged as his hardness sunk into soft heat, forgetting everything but that feeling and the strong vice of Hawke’s hands cupping him and keeping him steady. Hawke’s strong tongue swirled over his head, making him tense as a stone, sinking into the pillows. He didn’t care that his lungs were tugging in pain, that his heart was beating so hard he thought it might burst. Hawke swept the salty, thick beads on Anders’s tip, took more of him into his mouth as he swallowed, and felt something not far from pride as Anders grabbed his hair with all ten fingers and his hips thrashed. No slow building, not after all this time. A weak, warm little rush landed on Hawke’s tongue and was swallowed up.

Hawke gave him a moment to enjoy the heat and release, gently cleaning the small remnants from the slit. He breathed over Anders and gave the wilting head one last kiss.

Anders panted, lungs rasping loud as a millstone in the sudden quiet. He was dazed, staring, melted into a puddle. He felt Hawke move away.

The tide went out and left him blinking on the shore. He sat up and looked for Hawke. He was sitting at the edge of the mattress, still fully clothed, his arms folded across his knees.

Anders shifted over. “What’s wrong?”

The babe had moved, _reminding him_. “Nothing. I have a lot to do. I should…” he looked up vaguely.

“Hawke.”

Hawke shrugged. He was still hard, wanting, but touching himself was roulette. Sometimes he touched his chest and recoiled from the weird softness, or his wrist or knuckles brushed that round swell and it broke all of his rhythm.

“It doesn’t work,” Hawke explained.

Anders leaned on his shoulder. “Let me.”

“No.”

Anders unfolded himself, got onto his feet and went to Hawke’s wardrobe. He knew he looked more like a corpse than a banquet, but he felt Hawke’s eyes following him. He opened the small drawer - everything exactly where he remembered it. He took a dark handkerchief and one of the clear bottles of Orlaisan oil, and turned around with it in his hand.

“Anders, no. Not today.”

He was still so hard he couldn’t move. Anders wouldn’t leave him like that – as Justice had left Anders, so many nights, aching over what was forbidden. It was lonely, it was brutal, it was no way for a man to live. “Get behind if you want.”

“I’d want to see you.”

Anders was back on the bed. “All right. Shall I wear a blindfold?” A joke, to stop it getting so serious they couldn’t breathe.

Hawke actually chuckled, distractedly, his eyes fixed on Anders as he spread himself on the sheets. 

Anders dipped his fingers into the little bottle and rubbed them together so they caught the light. He reached between his legs and a fingertip disappeared. He went slowly; he hadn’t done this in awhile. A gentle swipe to stretch his ring of muscle, spreading oil inside and out, and then he joined it with a second finger up to the knuckle. He tried to ignore the rattle of his breath as he worked, circling his finger against his strong inner walls.

Hawke was motionless as a gargoyle, perched on the edge of the bed.

Anders drizzled more oil, spread it up the inside of his thigh, leaving a shimmering streak. Hawke inhaled. Anders used two fingers this time, stretching himself wider. He rocked the fingers side to side, not yet comfortable enough to scissor them apart. A few reaching stretches found the place that sent lightning through his groin and his spent manhood thickened back to life. He used his other hand to pull at it gently, and finally spread himself wider by adding a third finger.

“Anders.”

Hawke felt the little waves that meant release building, rolling over themselves deep inside. He didn’t want to be alone. His hands shook as he undid the buttons on his trousers. He stood unsteadily, got them and his smallclothes off, and trembling all over, he crawled to Anders.

Anders met him. He had oil warmed in his hand that he smeared on Hawke, up and down. He lay back and wiped them on the cloth as Hawke grasped his thin behind under his hips and lifted him. He was weightless compared to Hawke’s strength; he let his legs tent either side of Hawke and grasped him loosely. Hawke’s tip teased him for a few seconds, just touching the pucker of skin, and then Hawke couldn’t wait. He tipped his hips forward and pushed in. 

Hawke seated himself and balanced himself on his hands. His shirt hung loosely, shielding him, blocking Anders’s view. He gave a few slow thrusts.

Anders relaxed around the heavy, full strokes, puffing a little as Hawke rubbed over that spot and made him jerk.

“Okay?” Hawke asked.

“Whenever you’re ready.” Anders was ready, he was loose, he was sheltering Hawke, stroking his hands over Hawke’s biceps, bulging and hard as iron.

Hawke’s pace quickened, the strokes got shallower, faster, as Hawke shifted and leaned down to be near him. He wanted the quick rush of Anders’s breath across his face, he wanted being so close he could smell the sweat rising from Anders’s skin. Anders smiled, Hawke was too lost to smile back, caught by the tightness inside and out. Anders closed his eyes and enjoyed the ride, being taken, giving Hawke what he needed. His hardness, trapped between -

Anders opened his eyes in confusion. Then he realized. Hawke’s new belly was brushing him, big enough that it jostled Anders as Hawke worked. Instead of air between their bodies, a draft between their sweating, twitching stomachs, Hawke’s form filled that empty space. Pure love, happiness, crashed through Anders; they suddenly felt so much closer, closer than any speech, any sex could make them. They had become one, literally, they had worked a miracle. Anders wanted to laugh for joy.

Hawke felt the new friction between them too, and hunched his shoulders in disgust. Anders felt his hardness falter, inside, as sick and despair crossed his face. He stopped awkwardly, his cheeks went hot. There was nothing dignified about a naked man and his lover suddenly interrupted.

“Hawke-“ Anders reared up and grabbed Hawke, pushed back the curtain of dark hair out of his face and kissed his forehead. He felt Hawke’s blush, and stared into his eyes. “Hawke... Maker… You’re beautiful.” This was beautiful; the fire that made new life. If there was a nook, a cranny, like the countless small things that swarmed in a single drop of water, like the tree that grew in the Alienage, life was there. Accident or no, magic or no, it had found a way. 

Hawke looked back uncertainly.

“Beautiful,” Anders repeated. He pulled himself closer. He wanted to show Hawke how much he wanted this. Wanted to be with him. He squirmed under Hawke, and took Hawke’s balls on the palm of his hand. Anders played with them like he used to, just this side of rough, because the pain always made Hawke stand at attention. Hawke leaned down and kissed Anders, taking his mouth as Anders stroked his cock until he was hard again, and guided him back in. 

Hawke didn’t last long. Humiliation made love piquant, he wanted to get it over with as much as his body was begging for release. He made another few desperate plunges, trying to hold himself apart. Despite Anders’s assurances, despite Anders’s sudden explosion of energy, hungry and wanting and – happy – euphoric, Hawke still hated that jostling touch. But he was ravenous, and the sight of Anders beneath him undid him. The walls crashed and his ears rang, while Anders came again, splattering his stomach and Hawke’s shirt, every muscle going tense and releasing all at once, inside, out, with a half-strangled cry.

Hawke rolled away, Anders followed, and they slept.

Neither had had a good night. They made up for it now, while life moved on outside. Hours of oblivious, peaceful slumber, while the sun made its trek across the sky. 

Anders woke first, in the afternoon, and couldn’t bring himself to move. The dark rings had faded from Hawke’s sockets, but he was making up a long, lonely time. Sometimes Hawke drifted to the surface of sleep, and his eyes opened like the glimmer on the crest of a wave. Then he was met by Anders’s touch, a gentle stroke on his brow or a soft word of assurance that sent him back into deep, safe rest. 

They greeted each other at nightfall. The talk, the togetherness, had been like cleaning and stitching a wound. Not yet healed, but the ragged edges had been brought together so it could begin. They talked of softer things.

“When did you know?” Anders asked. He tried to imagine what it was like for Hawke, to be alone and to realize... 

Hawke’s mouth curled at the corner. “When my pants stopped fitting.”

His day-clothes were crumpled on the bed. Anders dragged the trousers closer by the leg and found the waist. The buttons had been let out unevenly, ripped off and sewn back on in a staggered line. The thread was bunched in little tangles. Hawke must have done it himself, too proud or scared to ask for help. “Who taught you to use a needle?” Anders asked, looking at the butcher-job.

“No one.”

“Have you been sleeping? Eating enough? Not drinking too much?”

“Hardly drinking at all. The thought of it makes me a little...” Hawke fluttered his hand near his stomach.

“Don’t force it. It’s better for you both.” Anders played with the buttons again. He would have helped. He had four thumbs when it came to sewing, but he would have helped. “Anything else?”

“Sometimes I want strange things,” Hawke admitted. Beets. Beets with just about everything. Beets and chicken. Beets and orange ice. Beets and other beets. 

Anders’s face softened. “Maybe it’s the babe telling you what it needs.”

Hawke raised an eyebrow. Cutesy wisdom stuck in his teeth like boiled toffee. “I can’t hide this forever.”

“We’ll think of something.”

“Maybe. They’ll help us.” Varric, Fenris, even Merrill might be useful, if it came to it.

“Who?”

“Our friends.”

Anders put aside the clothing. “I don’t have friends. I just have you.”


	14. Chapter 14

Lord Julius of Arnage lived at the top of his Higtown street, in an estate that hulked like an ancient oak. The house was decked like a king’s pleasure-yacht, the old, grey walls were dignified under a confetti of banners, balconies, and gleaming statues. The house was a torch in the night, every shutter was thrown open to cast the whole edifice in a lively golden glow. The front doors were flanked by braziers that burned brightly, heralded guests up the wide stone steps. Cullen climbed the steps toward the light and presented his invitation, and the doorman in a smart red and gold uniform announced him to the company.

Lord Julius was an odd, energetic man in a gold-threaded vest and white shirt. He spoke with his hands. He seemed too young to be bald but was bald all the same, and his shiny dome of cranium made his face look small, almost twee - soft, moist eyes, clean-shaven, no chin, perfect bow lips and a very straight, small nose. He made a point of greeting the Knight-Commander warmly, taking him by the arm and attaching him to a group near the drinks table. Then he flitted away again, moving with the tight energy of a conductor before an orchestra.

The hors d'oeuvres were excruciating; Cullen was passed from knot to knot, gripping his little plate of cheese and olives. He wore his full dress armor, the one with gold inlays and small steppes of steel across his shoulders, over a freshly-starched shirt. The collar itched, and he pulled at in irritation and nerves. Their smalltalk had its own rhythms, its own codes, that Cullen was deaf to. Niceties flew like knitting needles, working some invisible pattern. Cullen made a few attempts, blundered in, spoke out of turn, fell back in confusion, and finally resigned himself to silence. He chewed his cheese and nodded along dumbly.

Dinner being served brought no relief, just more faces and titles and Cullen’s brain trying to keep it all straight. He was in a seat of honor, right beside Lord Julius, who played host and monarch at the table’s head.

There was a great, hairy walrus of a man seated across from Cullen. His mustache and side chops were silver, and so were the crests strung along the wide front of his waistcoat. His cuffs were turned up to keep them out of the soup and gravy. Julius introduced him as Lord Whatsit of Something, and Cullen got the distinct impression his lordship found the soup course more interesting than the Knight-Commander of Kirkwall. When one was rich, one understood the really important things in life.

“Capital,” the man grumbled at Cullen, and went back to spooning bisque under his drooping bristle-brush of a mustache. His daughter, Lady Something of Wotsit from birth, sat to Cullen’s right. The father was rich; the daughter was beautiful. They smiled at one another, and she looked away to talk to a severe boy with jaunty sleeves. Cullen quickly grabbed up his wine and drained it.

Cullen stared at the heavy, creamy tablecloth and spoke little. The soup course finished, and out came something pale, poached in a thin butter sauce. Cullen took what he prayed was the right fork - Andraste guide him, he had no idea - and poked at it in its little white pool. He had lost his appetite almost the moment he arrived. The atmosphere was false with an undercurrent of poison. He wasn’t making a good impression, he was acting thick as a brick. He was certain they were all wondering how such a blockhead had become one of the most influential men in Kirkwall. And if he had to overhear one more sniff about Ferelden, give one more fake smile... He glanced at the thick-jowled man across the table, diligently dismembering white flesh and forking it into his mouth. How did they stand it? This was _torture_.

Cullen looked down at his place setting, at the candlelight dancing in the bowls of all those silver spoons. Maybe it was the wine getting to his head.

“I understand your family is from Ferelden, Knight-Commander?” Lady Something asked, smiling to show that her teeth were as pearly as the china. “What did your father do?”

She craned her long, white neck to gaze at him. His eyes couldn’t help themselves, they went easily from her red lips down to her bare shoulders, the low neckline rimmed with black and purple lace. She wore a pendant against her skin, a glimmering drop of gold that was nestled just in the shadow between her breasts. Her perfume was thick . Her voice poured in his ears like myrrh.

“He managed a granary.” Cullen had never been ashamed of his father, but looking at her pillowy, porcelain skin, her sleek dark hair held with gold pins and tiny pearls, he wished his mother had caught a lord’s eye instead of the man with chaff in his boots.

“You’ve done so well for yourself,” she gushed. “It’s amazing what people can do, no matter their start.”

“Capital,” Lord Something rumbled again, between slurps. “Capital.”

Cullen put his fingers over the rim of his wine glass as Lord Julius tipped the bottle toward it. “Could the Viscount not join us this evening?” he asked.

Lord Julius’s easy, oily smile didn’t falter. His bright look got still brighter. “Not tonight, Knight-Commander. We felt it was time we got to know you. We haven’t seen much of you, since...” He was too well-bred to do anything but _allude_ at the dinner table. He seemed about to turn away, changed his mind with a theatrical little twitch of his hand, and swooped back. “Actually, Ser Cullen, I am _glad_ you brought up the Viscount. Tell me: how has Ser Hawke’s tenure struck you?”

Cullen felt the trap spring shut; but what trap, to what end, he had no idea. “It’s been an adjustment.” Diplomacy, the sort he had learned dancing around Meredith’s paranoia.

Julius hmm’d. “He’s an Amell, did you know?”

Cullen nodded. The smalltalk faded as attention turned to the head of the table.

Julius went on. “The Amells have always been the... ah, the wild cousins. They have a _rebellious_ streak.” Sad nods from around the table. “You’ve seen it yourself,” Julius said, ingratiating, appealing to Cullen’s own eyes.

Cullen had his palm defensively over his wine glass, fingers just curled around the rim. He picked it up and thought of Amell, the young apprentice with depthless brown eyes and hip as round as the bowl of glass in his hand. He forced a smile for Julius.

Julius smiled back, a welcoming, conspiratorial sort of smile. “What else can one say about the Amells? Stubborn. Willful. Unpredictable.” Another pause, full of remorse and regret. “Those aren’t qualities one needs in a leader - not in times like these. Hawke is the worst man for the job.”

A pause, designed to let Cullen get uneasy, as Julius took another bite. He chewed and swallowed as Cullen glanced around for a friendly face and met only solemn looks.

“No one is _blaming_ you, of course,” Julius said soothingly, bringing the charges under the guise of dismissing them. “Ser Hawke seemed the perfect choice. He was the hero of the hour. The people’s Champion. How were you to know?”

Vipers, that’s what they were, Cullen decided. A whole nest of them, slithering around in the dark. And he’d been swallowed whole. Outwardly, he smiled again, gratefully. Lady Whoever’s perfume was in his nostrils, suffocating instead of sweet.

“But you can’t work with him,” Julius continued. “He won’t compromise, won’t take advice. He doesn’t know the city, or its people. He’s not good for Kirkwall. No viscount is better than one who will lead us to ruin.”

“Ruin?” Cullen was locked in his tower as tightly as his apprentices - he heard only echoes of what went on across the bay.

“Starkhaven. Sebastian Vael has gone home and reclaimed his throne.”

Vael. Cullen knew the man as a Brother who came to hear confessions. There was no one in Kirkwall who didn’t know Vael and his history - he was proud of it, it shone like a halo around his Brotherly vows. (Or perhaps the vows crowned the prince.) Meredith had liked him and his pure faith. In latter days, he was one of the few she still trusted with the keeping of her mages’ souls. “I see.”

“Vael left in a fury. But if we act quickly, I am sure he’ll see reason.”

“Act?” Cullen wasn’t as thick as all that - but Julius was nosing the wine bottle toward his glass again.

“Knight-Commander, let me be frank.” Julius set down the bottle, and then set down his knife with a heavy clink.

Around the table, the scraping of silverware stopped. Even the lump gave up his forking.

“Please,” Cullen said, not quite hiding his exasperation. Get on with it, man.

“We must remove Ser Hawke from office, and bring the apostate to justice. We must do this quickly. If we do not, Vael will return with an army... and Kirkwall will burn.”

Cullen exhaled through his nose.

Julius's small face pinch in a grim smile. “The Vaels are just as stubborn as the Amells, in their way. Swearing revenge, raising the Chantry’s blood and zeal. To march on a city - and march he will - all over a single apostate.”

“It’s mad,” Cullen agreed, hating himself for the sudden rush of loyalty - _this_ man had sense, this man saw reason, this man wanted peace -

“That’s where you come in,” Julius continued, sensing his willingness, bringing Cullen up to speed on a plan long since laid out: “You’re the Knight-Commander. The apostate is your responsibility. The Viscount has no authority over your tower - he may as well try to dictate to the Imperium or change the creed of the Qun. A civil pardon for an apostate? Whoever heard of such a thing?”

“The apostate is a Grey Warden,” Cullen objected. He remembered the look on Greagoir’s face when he had learned _that_.

Julius brushed the objection aside like a child’s toy left on the stairs. “The Wardens don’t want him any more than we do. Their Commander in Ferelden doesn’t even read my letters.”

“The Viscount...” Cullen began.

“Leave the Viscount to us.” Julius leaned in. His eyes were hard. “Knight-Commander, the mess is on our doorstep. Do your part, and there will be rewards.”

Cullen felt Lady Something’s beautiful hand squeeze his thigh. His stare shot across the table.

Her father’s moist, bulging eyes finally rose from his food. He exhaled through his mustache; it might have been a smile. “Capital.”

* * *

On the landing outside Hawke’s bedroom, Anders hooked one finger into the curtains and twitched them aside. He peered through the small slit of window. Several streets away, an estate was lit from the gutters to the eaves, throwing enough light to catch the underside of gathering clouds. Anders pulled his eyes back from the glow to scan the dark, still street beneath the window, and let the curtains fall back. He did the same at other windows, a furtive little peek and getting his head down again, like a man on the walls of a keep under siege.

Waiting for Hawke all day was hard, but the hours after sunset were the worst. He started hearing things in distant parts of the house - windows creaking open, boots on the stairs. The whispers inside got stronger after dark, too. Without the sun to burn it off, the mist rose thick.

In the daylight, Anders kept to his own room. It was a novelty, a door he could close at will. Thirty-some years old, and he got a little, childish thrill when he shut it - how the light and sound and air bottled up, kept just for him. And knowing he could open it again whenever he wished.

He spent his time reading. The room was still spartan, still no curtains on his windows, but it looked lived in. Books were stacked on the floor around the bed. Socks were caught in some of them. Candle stubs and dishes full of dried wax, crumbs, apple cores, cherry pits littered the table. No one cleaned. Things accrued. Orana had gone away for good, to some family without a madman in the attic.

Hawke never came for him. Anders went to him most nights - every night - and Hawke took him in without a word, let Anders slip into bed beside him and curl up close. Hawke was usually gone when he woke up.

What could they talk about? They had never bothered with idle talk, or shared jokes about small things. The big things were always too close at hand, and now neither had the energy for them. 

Anders retreated to his room. Closing the door and opening it again soothed him, like rocking a babe. He did it a few times, pushing the slab of wood into its jamb, then hauling it free. Hawke didn’t like to be ambushed the moment he got in the door. He would brush Anders aside until he had changed, washed, dressed for the night. All in private. He used to be so free with his clothes. Being naked never took a second thought for Hawke. Now he changed in private, hid himself, kept Anders’s hands from coming too close.

Anders heard a cheerful bark from Dog, greeting Hawke as he returned. Anders stepped into his room.

He wanted to look human for Hawke. He looked down at his clean clothes. The things he had worn at the Gallows, his robe, staff, boots, were nowhere to be found, but if he couldn’t dress like a mage, he could at least dress himself like a man. He had finally put aside the nightshirt uniform of the invalid and pulled on dark leggings, a shirt more white than grey, and picked through his socks until he found two without holes. They almost matched. Anders’s hair was a mess of split, uneven ends and it was getting long. It crackled in the comb as he pulled and tied it back for bed.

He went down the hall and across the dim landing, past the room still shut tight and full of Hawke’s mother’s things - maybe Hawke had tried a little of the same magic, bottling up his memories of her to keep them fresh - and to Hawke’s door. Seven years ago, he had found it standing open for him. Now it was closed tight, the hinges were sagging, and every swing was a protest. Anders grabbed the heavy handle.

(Still thinking of the past - Hawke had been so _young_ , Maker, young and beautiful, arms crossed in profile against his chest, staring into the fire and smouldering.)

(Had he ever been that young? He must have been, once. He couldn’t remember it.)

(Everything had been new. The carpets, the clothes that he peeled off Hawke’s body, the stiff mattress where for just a moment he held Hawke in complete silence, and realized that this life might still matter.)

(He had been terrified.)

He turned the handle. The hinges didn’t screech when he pushed. The door swung open and light spilled silently at Anders’s feet.

Hawke stood in front of his wardrobe, looking intently at himself in the mirror so Anders saw him in profile. Hawke wore a loose shirt the color of maroon rust, soft and embroidered at the hem and wrists, soft pants to match. Both hands rested on his middle, just the fingertips. As Anders watched he moved one hand uncertainly over the swell, tracing the new, strange contour, testing its firmness. His eyes followed his fingers. His face was open, curious. Gentle.

Maker, oh Maker. Anders’s heart grew warm. “Hawke.”

The spell shattered. Hawke’s hands rushed away from himself and grabbed the wardrobe door. He turned to glare at Anders, icing over.

Anders wished from the bottom of his being that he hadn’t spoken, that he had left Hawke to explore in peace. Hawke was blushing deeply. Anders could see pink at his cheekbones.

But it was nothing to be _ashamed_ of. Anders shook his head reassuringly. “It’s all right to look. To touch. It’s happening.”

“Why am I so _fat_?” Hawke asked harshly. He slammed the wardrobe so he couldn’t see the mirror.

“You’re not ‘fat’.” But Anders knew when to stop. He couldn’t talk Hawke through this. He wished again he had just closed the door and gone away. “You didn’t have time to heal. When the muscles are weak, you... show earlier. And get bigger.”

Hawke’s look could have stoned a crow.

Anders waited to be sent away, but Hawke turned his back on Anders and stalked to the table to arrange his papers. 

Anders followed him into the room. He watched as Hawke rolled his shoulders tiredly, and rubbed his eyes. They were both trying. They lived their lives in the eye of the storm, wary of the anger that ringed them on all sides. It took every ounce of energy to love each other and keep the rest at bay. 

Anders undressed to his skin. He went to the bed and drew back the soft, worn coverlet. Hawke blew out the candle.

When Hawke slid under the covers, Anders turned on his side. “Have you felt it move?”

“I don’t want to talk about this.” Hawke settled on his side, facing Anders. Their eyes adjusted to the dark and found each other, a hand-span apart. Their warmth melted together beneath the blankets.

Anders caught a strand of black hair that had escaped from its tie, and tucked it behind Hawke’s ear. Hawke’s cheek was still hot with humiliation. “I’m not trying to embarrass you. I just want to know everything’s all right.”

“I’m not your little wife. I don’t need you fussing over me.”

Leave off, leave it alone. Anders took his hand away. He folded his pillow between his head and his elbow and tried not to sound hurt. “Where’s my staff?”

Hawke raised his shoulder in a half-shrug. “They didn’t give it to me. Burned as kindling, probably.”

“They don’t burn.”

Hawke didn’t seem to hear him. “Your robe was a lost cause. I’ll buy you a new one.”

“I don’t want you to buy me things.” He only wanted Hawke to... let him in. It was lonely out here in the dark.

Hawke must have read his hurt, and made an effort of his own - he leaned forward and kissed him.

Anders closed his eyes and tasted it, touching Hawke’s tongue with his own. The kiss was still bitter with distance, cool with not-quite trust. Anders wrapped an arm around Hawke’s shoulders, but Hawke braced himself when Anders tried to draw him close. He could feel the warm ghost of Hawke’s body near his own, the maddening feather-brushes of Hawke’s clothes.

“Please.” He wished Hawke would be naked with him. He wanted Hawke’s skin against his. Real, warm, human skin, with all its rough and smooth places. Salty with sweat, hair and scars, blood rushing through it and Hawke’s deep scent. 

But Hawke refused. He turned Anders away from him and curled against Anders’s thin back. His shape and form were muffled by the clothes he wore and the uneven pillows.

Hawke’s arm snaked around Anders. Anders held his breath in anticipation as Hawke traced down his chest, making a slow, steady line toward his groin.

“If it was you, it would be so simple.” Hawke cradled Anders’s stomach, low, holding his hand against slim cords of muscle and the arch of bone. His calloused fingers stroked Anders’s thin skin, tracing the trail of lighter hair that bridged the dip of his navel and the darker hair between his legs. Anders went stiff with blood, an inch from Hawke’s hand, as Hawke breathed words in his ear. “I’d put you away somewhere. No one would have to know. I’d keep you safe.”

Anders grabbed Hawke’s elbow, folding Hawke’s arm against him tightly.

Hawke took the lobe of Anders’s ear between his teeth. Anders grew harder, nudging at the back of Hawke’s hand, and still Hawke brushed his belly instead of _touching_ him. Hawke pressed his mouth against Anders’s shoulder and buried his face. It was cool, the humiliation had gone. Anders felt him fading and bit his lip, keeping still as Hawke relaxed. Hawke’s fingertips stopped their tickling strokes. His arm turned to dead weight.

Sleeping. Lightly snoring, with his nose dug against Anders’s neck.

Anders reached for himself in frustration. Every breath Hawke took sent a surge through him, made him ache. He felt under the pillows for a handkerchief.

When he was through, he balled it and dropped it onto the floor. He got comfortable against Hawke and felt Hawke’s toes nudging between his feet. He listened over the coursing of his own blood to the night-sounds of their room, the creek of the bed, the rough ends of his hair scraping the pillow. Hawke’s breathing was deeper, quicker. Small signs. Anders set two fingertips in the groove of Hawke’s wrist. He gauged the heartbeat nestled between tendon and bone. Working hard, even at rest. Anders caressed Hawke’s forearm and smiled.

He was almost asleep when he heard a voice in the dark, sharp as a spear. “Anders.”

* * *

His heart's his mouth:  
What his breast forges, that his tongue must vent;  
And, being angry, does forget that ever  
He heard the name of death.  
\- _The Tragedy of Coriolanus_

* * *

The shouting had emptied the streets, as a riot does - sent the timid behind the sturdy doors of their homes, while the angry were drawn into the crowd to give their own strength. Cullen found the crowd 

Cullen elbowed through them, shaking off angry hands and ducking their bellows - they were nothing to him, even with bricks in their hands; he was used to dealing with the acting-out of mages - until he found a firm line of the Guard at the Keep’s doors. Aveline was at their head, a shield in hand.

A few stones pelted them, early drops before the downpour, and Aveline gave the order to form up. A line of shields came up, walling her and Cullen off from the crowd. Bits of masonry showered them as Cullen raised his voice to be heard, drowned out for a minute by a new roar of noise and the sharp crack of brick and stones bouncing off metal. “Captain?” 

“Get inside, Knight-Commander.”

Cullen looked at the mob past the shield wall. She nodded him inside to a wave of shouting and squeezed into the line beside her men. 

The Keep was hushed after the violence outside. The corridors were empty as civil servants and Kirkwall’s minor lords and ladies kept their heads down. Cullen saw a few peer nervously around corners at him as he went up the stairs. His boots sunk into the plush red carpet. 

The scene outside Hawke’s office was depressingly familiar. The unrest hadn’t penetrated this far into the Keep; business as usual. Hawke’s aide stood beside his closed office door, shifting on his feet in the lull before the next hurricane of orders. Cullen waited too, hands nervously clasped behind his back. He was too nervous to sit on the low benches. His feet were planted like roots, but there was an occasional tremble through him, like the breeze stirring oak leaves. 

The hall was empty but for Cullen and the aide, and the occasional civil servant who flitted through like a ghost. The aide took a small parcel from his pocket, unwrapped a bread roll, and took a few quick bites, leaving a dusting of cheese and bread on his shirtfront. His thick long tongue gathered up the crumbs on his wet lips, and Cullen had to look away. He hadn’t been able to face more than a glass of weak beer before this audience, and almost lost that over the side of the boat coming to Kirkwall. 

They heard the Viscount’s voice rising inside his office, and the muffled, more restrained replies of some poor devil on the receiving end. The aide stuffed the half-roll into his jacket and brushed his hands together, then yanked on his jacket to straighten it. The voices got louder, and the door sprung open.

Hawke raged at the man all the way to the threshold, like a bear charging out of a cave. “Find the person responsible and sack him. And sack whoever sacks him, for not doing it sooner.”

The devil in question was a small, sour man, the sort who scurries around halls of government hearing and seeing everything, and hoping not to be seen or heard in turn. Face like curdled milk, and a voice like it, too. He was clutching a wild stack of paperwork to his chest protectively as Hawke harried him along. His voice was a thin, bilious whine through the nose. “Ser, really, it was a large project. I don’t think it will be possible to...”

“Then sack them _all_.” 

The little man quick-stepped away. Hawke turned to his aide, still foaming. “Can you bring me some tea?”

“Yes, serrah.”

“Maker’s glory, ‘yes’!” Hawke rolled his eyes to Cullen, animatedly ushering him through the door with a swinging arm. “That’s a word I don’t think I’ve heard yet today!” 

Cullen walked stiffly into the office and Hawke yanked the door shut behind them. Cullen had rehearsed over and over, and launched into his words before he took a breath, “Ser Hawke, I-”

“You’ve come about the finances, or the tariffs, or the taxes, or some other damn thing.” Hawke moved quickly to his desk. He picked up the note from Cullen, scanned it, and then glanced at a second bit of paper next to the first. “Well, no. No, they’ve all said no. I can’t give you any more money. Lord Julius has been looking back through the treasury’s books and they’re wrong, he says. Forgot to deduct this, wrongly added that. Going back ten years, apparently.” Hawke snorted. “The moment I set foot in the city, it all went wrong.”

Cullen dared look at his face. The Viscount’s eyes were dark and steep – a sudden drop into blackness, like falling down a dry well, like being hurled into the Void. Cullen saw a man trapped inside. 

Hawke blinked and the man was gone. “They won’t even let me refit the Guard. They’re not going to give me a single bit for the Tower.”

“I’ve written to Orlais.” Cullen suddenly had far fewer mouths to feed, but the Tower had lost most of its alchemists, its runecrafters, those whose arts brought in money. The Circle subsisted by its own means, under the Chantry’s wing. But sometimes the Chantry’s stipends were too small, sometimes other arrangements had to be made. Petitioning the Viscount in a lean year was usual and expected. Help had always come before.

Until Lord Julius got hold of the purse strings. Hawke shook his head apologetically. “Feed them twice a day. Make it last. I’ll see what I can do.”

Cullen nodded. He hadn’t come to talk about feeding the apprentices; but best if Julius believed he had. Hawke had interrupted and he lost his momentum, now Cullen took a breath and looked up from Hawke’s desk.

Hawke had installed a marble bust of himself in his office, behind the desk, his head and shoulders on a pedestal of dark wood nestled between the bookcases. It took Cullen by surprise - they looked nothing alike, it was ridiculous, but when he saw the stone bust sitting in its alcove, he saw _Meredith_. 

The impression shattered and passed in half a heartbeat. A quick shake of his head to clear it. She was gone. She was resting, ever-frozen, someplace in Orlais. Seekers of Truth had come to examine the statue, the remains, whatever they were. They brought a mage. Cullen had watched as they used spells and, at last, a chisel and hammers. The Seekers had taken her away in a hay-lined box draped with a cloth the color of blood. 

Cullen tried to gather his thoughts, feeling Hawke’s impatient stare. Cullen looked away from the lifeless stone eyes, to the Viscount in the flesh. 

When the smoke cleared, it was instinct to bow to the strongest man in sight - and that was the Champion, Hawke, sweat on his brow and light in his hair like laurel, glowing with victory. Without thinking, Cullen had played kingmaker. 

He tried not to think. He had practiced for years. Since Ferelden, he trusted nothing in this life, least of all its mages. He had stopped trusting even himself. And now none of his men trusted him, the apprentices despised him, and the nobles invited him to dinners and flattered him as though he were a simpleton. 

If Cullen could trust anyone, it was the man who had freed them from Meredith’s madness. But the Viscount had no time for him, didn’t rate him higher than a rat’s turd; Hawke stood at his desk, moving a mosaic of papers as if working a jigsaw. More animated than Cullen had seen him in a long time, but looking heavier. The way his armor was let out and strapped ruined the effect of its mirror shine - softness and indulgence creeping up, set against the hard edge of his cuirass. It made him look more has-been than hero, a man who had worn his honors out and made up for it with a swelling belt.

Cullen had to force the words through his throat. “Ser Hawke, I’ve come for another reason.”

“If it’s to tell me about the crowd, I already know,” Hawke said wryly. “Aveline’s taking care of it.”

Cullen felt the guilt twisting his insides. Maybe it was Julius’s dinner sitting badly. “The people can’t forgive or forget what was done. They aren’t happy that a dangerous man has been set free.”

“Let them grumble,” Hawke said. He turned away, nonchalantly, to look at his bust. He brushed a speck of dust from it. 

Cullen rubbed his fingertips together nervously inside his glove, feeling the leather slip and slide against his skin. He sucked his teeth. “It’s more than grousing,” he said. _Look outside,_ he wanted to say. Just _look_. “The nobles...”

Hawke’s posture didn’t change, but Cullen sensed he was suddenly listening very hard.

He had promised secrecy. They had promised he would remain Knight-Commander. He was caught between a rock and a hard place, the nobles and all of their power, and Hawke and all of his. But something pulled him toward the Viscount. Maybe it was just how tired he was of treachery. Hawke was violently stubborn, but at least he was honest. “Vael is gone, but they come to me in his name. You shouldn’t be quick to dismiss them. They’re bent on seeing the apostate returned to the Circle. It’s the only way to appease Starkhaven.”

Silence. Cullen bit his tongue nervously, as he had when he reported to Meredith. She used to sit clutching the hilt of her sword, wide-eyed. One false step and he would have lost all her trust. He wanted to warn the man - for everyone’s sake. He had seen the Viscount and his mage at their worst, that day at the Gallows, and caught a glimpse of something terrifying. There was love and fire between them, quick and temperamental, and Cullen was afraid it would burn them all alive. 

He wanted to warn Hawke for Hawke’s own sake, too. Cullen had always liked him, even as he feared him. Hawke was clever, strong, a good man deep down. He would have made a hell of a recruit, and a hell of a commander. Now Cullen saw Hawke’s enemies all around him, and his instinct was to lend a sword and shield.

Hawke turned around. “He’s not going back to the Circle.” His voice had the note of finality, like the jerk and crack at the end of a hangman’s noose. No discussion.

“Ser Hawke, please. This whole city, for the sake of one man -” 

Hawke interrupted. “How was your party? I’m told Lord Julius has a marvelous chef.”

Cullen colored pink. 

“If our noble friends are worried, they can take it up with me themselves.” Hawke shifted topics again. “Do you have Anders’s staff? He’s asked for it back.” 

Cullen frowned. Hawke was shameless where the apostate was concerned. No, not shameless: calculated, to show Cullen how little stock he put in him and his noble handlers, and in the shouting of mere mortals on the street. “I… don’t know.” 

“Look for it.” Hawke turned smartly and reached for a volume on his shelf.

Dismissed. Cullen went to the door, paused, and glanced again at Hawke’s turned back, wondering if the Viscount could really be so stupid. He must have some plan, Cullen thought. He’s biding his time. They were all unwitting, Hawke was playing them all. 

The sinking feeling in his stomach said otherwise. 

* * * 

Cullen closed the door behind him. Hawke exhaled, put a hand in his hair, scratched along his scalp, and turned around. He picked up the note in one of Varric’s many and varied hands - “ask the KC if he enjoyed Julius’s party.” Hawke crumpled it up and set it to burn in a lamp, and listened to it pucker and crackle. 

Outside, the shouting went on.


	15. Chapter 15

Anders knocked solidly on Hawke’s door and waited for the terse “Come in.” He found Hawke standing in front of the fireplace brushing his sleeves. Dog was a furry, snorting, unwelcoming sack at the foot of the bed. 

“You’re home early,” Anders accused. It was half-past five and the sun was still above the horizon. 

Hawke grunted. He was moving with purpose instead of unwinding after the day. Anders watched him straighten his collar with oddly fidgeting fingers and asked, “Are you going out again?”

“No.” Hawke nodded toward the bed, where two packages sat wrapped in paper and string. “Those’re for you.”

Anders looked at them suspiciously. “I’ve said I don’t want you to buy me things.” 

Hawke raised his eyebrows. “Maybe I’m just tired of you looking so grubby.”

Anders was back in his nightgown and socks. The experiment with day clothes hadn’t lasted long, not while he had so much to read and think on. (He was using ink as freely as water again, and reams of paper, too. Hawke never said a thing when he came back to an empty work table, scavenged for supplies by a mage too frightened to go into the cellars.) He was still in yesterday’s night clothes, rumpled where he had been wringing them through his hands most of the day. He grabbed the thready material again and gave it another anxious twist. “Can we talk?” he asked quietly. 

Hawke looked distractedly at him, still set on making the outline of his clothes neat. “Now?”

“Please.” 

“I don’t have time.” 

The flat, brash gong sounded in the hall. Anders and the mabari raised and swiveled their heads in unison. Hawke laughed, short and dry.

“Who’s that?” Anders asked. 

“Company.” Hawke fussed one more time with his shirt. He leaned over carefully to gather his shoes. 

Anders traced Hawke’s body with his eyes. His shirt buttons were tight. “You’re wearing that?” Without armor to help disguise him, it was obvious. Maker, it was obvious.

“Are you saying I’m fat?” Hawke demanded. He stretched his back and sat on the bed beside Dog to wedge on his tight shoes. 

“No, I just mean -” Then Anders saw that Hawke was smiling his fanged smile. Anders looked away, suddenly aware of just how _lonely_ he was. Hawke was like a minnow, darting up to him and flashing away the moment Anders reached out his hands. He still ran hot and cold, loving and mean. 

Hawke finished dressing and stood. He jabbed a finger at the packages. “Get dressed and come down.” And as he turned away, so Anders couldn’t see his face, “I need you.”

He left. Anders went cautiously to the bed. Dog rolled onto his back, bored of antagonizing the mage. His legs splayed laddishly and his tongue drooped from the corner of his mouth. 

Anders wrinkled his nose. “Such an elegant beast.”

He worked clumsily at the knotted strings and peeled back the thin, frosty paper. His fingers brushed soft, spiny things - feathers, black as a raven’s. He picked up the garment by its shoulders and let it hang. A robe. It was cut like his old robe, but where his had been grey, faded, and fraying, this one was black and sleek. The stitching was tighter, the material was thicker, and the bolero and robe were trimmed with gold. It looked and felt expensive, nothing like the rough charity he had worn before. 

He laid it out on the bed. He guessed what he would find in the next package, and he wasn’t wrong: boots with tough soles, made of leather that was stiffly new, polished to a shine, and smelled pristine, strung with twisted cotton laces of yellow-gold. They were handsome. He used to like handsome things. 

He dropped the boots onto the bed. He didn’t want any of it. He should go down in his socks and let Hawke be ashamed of him. He had a deep instinct to be contrary. He still had his pride, and ten years of a noble demon’s thrift... but he felt the stone floor through the hole in his sock and curiosity got the better of him. He’d put them on tonight; he didn’t have to keep them. 

The gong rang again while he dressed, and a third time. He got into a shirt and leggings and pulled the robe on over them. It was heavy. The boots were loose around his skinny calves and too wide at the heel. 

“How do I look?” he asked Hawke’s animal, staring at himself in the mirror. Dog snored into his paws.

* * *

Hawke was waiting in the main hall, glancing impatiently up the stairs for him. Other than Hawke, the hall was empty. The library glowed gold behind its door. Their company must be inside.

Anders was jumpy and cold. He was winded just from the short exertion of dressing and the stairs. The robe’s collar weighed on his shoulders. He was too thin; the robe didn’t fit. It hung on him and looked ridiculous for it. He was like a scarecrow come to life in a moonlit field, hobbling across the shadowy floor with unsteady joints and badly-fit clothes. He couldn’t read Hawke’s face and he slowed even more, on his guard and growing afraid.

Hawke nodded toward the library. “Come on.”

“Who’s in there?” Anders planted his ridiculously shiny boots against the floor, hanging back in fright.

“Our friends.” 

“Why?” Anders asked; what _friends_?

Hawke seemed very satisfied with himself, so Anders was ready to hate the next words out of his mouth - he always did - but Hawke still managed to catch him by surprise: “I’m going to tell them.” 

What little blood was in his cheeks drained away. Anders felt the world stop, or maybe his heart missed a beat and that made time stand still. “What?”

“Come on,” Hawke said, reaching for Anders’s shoulder and for the door. 

“Are you mad?” Anders struggled back against him. “They won’t understand. They’ll think... Hawke, _think_ about it -”

But Hawke was an unstoppable force once he had made up his mind, and Anders was too weak to resist. Hawke dragged them both toward the door, bringing Anders across the tiles with him. Anders grabbed at his arms desperately. “They won’t understand. _Listen to me_.”

Too late. Hawke knocked open the door with his foot and shoved Anders through. Anders stumbled into the bright room and whirled around. Their friends - Hawke’s friends - the inner circle, the ivy that clung to Hawke’s life in Kirkwall - sat together: Varric, lounging in a chair, Fenris sitting straight-backed with his hands on his knees and a sword on his back, Aveline with a hip on the corner of the table, tired after the day and with a yellowing bruise on her cheekbone from a well-aimed bit of brick. And Merrill, cross-legged on the floor by the fireplace. A rare sight, all of them in one room. A bottle had gone around and their glasses were full. The fire was obliviously cheerful. 

They looked up at Anders as he stumbled through the door and his heart quailed at so many sudden eyes. He hadn’t seen Aveline, or Fenris, or Merrill in these last months and they all stared at him curiously, ruthlessly, like a jury. What was Hawke doing? His knees were weak and he wanted to run.

Hawke’s hand was bunched in the back of collar like he was hanging from a nail. Anders yanked himself out of Hawke’s grip and pleaded with him, ignoring the others. “Please, Hawke. This is between you and me. Please don’t -” He was afraid. Of Hawke, of all of them. They wouldn’t understand a thing, he would leave this room in Aveline’s handcuffs or dead by the elf’s blade. He had been a fool to believe Hawke had changed. Games, that was all they were, he played games -

“Sit down,” Hawke commanded.

Anders grabbed for him again. “Please, don’t do this.”

Hawke brushed him aside and faced his friends. There was a shadow of disapproval in the set of Aveline’s lips and Varric’s look was curious with a twist of pity. Fenris glowered like an ogre. (None of them were stupid enough to take Hawke for the newly-successful man, taking his earned place in the upper echelons. They saw too much drink, too much food, that Hawke was trapped in a life that was all wrong for him.) 

First there was business to discuss. Aveline was anxious to begin. Anders slunk to the wall and listened as Aveline reported on the protests in the city, and she and Hawke went back and forth on rounding up the instigators. Varric chipped in that the ‘instigators’ probably had coin in their pockets still warm from noble hands, and the real instigators were beyond even Aveline’s long and lawful reach. 

Anders avoided Fenris’s glare and tried to staunch a new bleed. Hawke’s life was going to pieces and he hadn’t even known. Demonstrations, unrest, the Treasury - Hawke had kept it all from him. These things must have been tumbling through his head during all those long nights, and all the while he had lain not a foot from Anders. Sleeping in the same bed, living in different worlds. 

But that little regret, the pocket of hurt, was small compared to the terror he was swallowing with each breath. They were already pitying Hawke for being fat and unhappy. If he told them about the babe, they would think he was mad, and then...

“There’s something else,” Hawke said, finally, standing like a general before his strange council of war. “And I only want to say this once, because it’s going to sound absurd.” 

Aveline shook her head as she refilled her glass; two fingers of golden whiskey, and then one more for good measure. Her grimace said it had already been a long day.

Varric was thinking the same. “Absurd’s not so strange around here. Lay it on us, Hawke.”

Hawke glanced at Anders and cleared his throat. “I know you’re all sitting there thinking I should put down the pastries.”

Varric raised his glass good-naturedly. “Nah, I like it. You’re starting to make me look _svelte_. Dwarves don’t get called that much.” 

Hawke chuckled. It was forced, halting, something only Anders could hear. For an instant Anders wished he believed in Andraste, and prayed that Hawke would lose his nerve. 

“I’m pregnant.” 

The words slowly toppled over in the silence. Anders looked up, as gingerly as looking into the sun, and searched from face to face. Varric and Aveline were waiting for the punchline. The clouds were gathering on Fenris’s thin brow, and Merrill...

“Oh!” A little, startled cry of happy surprise exploded from her cupid lips. “Congratulations! Imagine that... !” She noticed the stony faces around her and stifled whatever else was about to bubble off her tongue.

Varric set his teeth together, as if biting at what he’d just heard to test for a fake. He smiled with fond, but patience-thinned exasperation. “Funny, Hawke.”

“Am I laughing?” Hawke asked darkly. He turned abruptly. “Anders?”

Anders stared back wordlessly, with a stricken look that was plain for all to see.

The air escaped from the room. Varric’s easiness evaporated, the always-grinning mask was swiped away.

“You’re telling us...” Varric said slowly, his words struggling for flight through the thick, tense atmosphere that rang like a leaden bell, and his eyes glued to Hawke and the way his shirt was full and straining, “He... did something to you?”

“Three guesses,” Hawke said dryly. “But _do_ remember there are ladies present.” 

Varric found Anders, hiding behind Hawke. (His look gave Varric a jolt. It brought back the storyteller. He saw Blondie’s fear and he guessed, with the intuition that made his stories feel more true than the truth itself, at a lot of sad and hidden things. It convinced him, and whatever happened later, whatever he said or did, whether he was the friend he could have been or not, in that moment he was sure that Hawke was carrying a child, and it was Blondie’s, and they - Hawke, Blondie, Kirkwall, all of them - were fucked.) 

“How...” Aveline began, warily, as if she was still worried about treading on a practical joke.

“I’ll tell you how.” Fenris had been twitching in his chair, his mind on magisters and murder and his glare on Anders, and now he got to his feet. “Magic. Blood magic.” 

Speeches from Fenris were rare. They came up like geysers from a heart that was rough in its pain, and bloodied. The molten, silver cracks across his skin glowed like the breaking earth. “No mage is to be trusted. He’s as bad as any magister in the Imperium.” He snarled the words, gnashed them, tearing flesh and tasting fury. “Forget the templars. Let’s deal with him now.”

“You’re going to kill him?” Merrill asked, innocently confused. “This is a happy time, Hawke.”

Fenris turned on her. “You daft little witch.”

“Daisy, you don’t understand,” Varric said, not much more patiently.

“I understand that Hawke is afraid. He doesn’t need to be.” Merrill was gazing at Hawke far too knowingly. “Anders will look after him.” 

Hawke looked hard at her, sizing her up. She smiled back with her depthless, tactless innocence. 

Fenris had his sword in hand. “Hawke. Stand aside.”

Aveline stood up, putting her height and the weight of her Captain’s armor against the snowballing crisis. “ _Enough._ I’m Captain of the Guard, and I won’t allow murder. Blood magic is a matter for the templars.”

“They’ll kill him,” Anders said. It was the first time he had interrupted. 

“What are you talking about?” Hawke asked. He was as surprised as the rest, and Anders looked at him hopelessly. 

“They’ll kill me, and then they’ll kill you. That’s what they do to things they don’t understand.”

Fenris caught the slight, real or imagined, and flushed angrily. He hurled a look of rage at them, and it wasn’t only for Anders. It was for the man standing in front of him, too, a flash of real hate that broke across Hawke’s chest. 

Varric interrupted. “Well, _I_ don’t understand, but I’m not about to kill anyone. Come on, Elf. Put the big sharp thing down.”

Fenris snarled again, and let the blade sag in his hand. He fixed his scowl on Hawke.

“What will you do?” Aveline asked, struggling to make any of this seem _reasonable_. 

“Deal with it,” Hawke said. “But I need your help.”

Varric shook his head. “There’s no way you’re keeping that secret. You and Blondie have to get out of here.”

“And leave the city to them? Come on.” Hawke smiled bravely. His appeal was met with a carefully blank look from the dwarf, and he tried again: “Come on, Varric.” 

Anders hated to hear the plea in Hawke’s voice, and when it went unanswered Anders felt the pain as if it were his own.

Hawke turned to Aveline.

Aveline still had a frozen, unsure look, like a first-time visitor to a mad ward.“This is... this is too strange, Hawke. I don’t know what you want me to say.” 

Varric had made up his mind. “We can stall while you get things together. We’ll get you out of here. I’ll go to work on them. What did Cullen say? Who’s behind it? How many of them are in on it?”

Hawke looked like the ice was cracking beneath his feet. “I didn’t...” 

“Great,” Varric said sharply. 

Hawke seemed to shrink. Anders reached for his wrist. 

His touch shocked Hawke back to himself. Hawke tore his arm away from Anders and squared back up. He glared at Varric. “If you won’t help me, get out of my house.” His glare went to Aveline and Fenris, tense as Varric, and Merrill, who was at a loss in this storm-tossed sea of anger. “That goes for all of you.”

“Don’t do this, Hawke,” Varric warned.

“Get out.”

Varric washed his hands of it. “We’re going.” 

Hawke watched, unspeaking, as they filed out. Varric went first, then Aveline herding Merrill, and Fenris. He had lapsed into silence, like a volcano is silent, hiding its furies. 

Fenris paused in front of Hawke and Anders, met Hawke’s open stare, and Anders sensed something pass between them, something Hawke wanted to resist, but didn’t have the strength. 

Fenris’s eyes darted to Anders. “Check its ears when it comes,” he sneered. 

He went out, and they were alone with the chairs and empty glasses. 

“What did he mean?” Anders asked.

A log slipped in the fire. Sparks flew against the hearth like stardust and died.

“Hawke.”

“You know what he meant.”

* * * 

“Another?” Varric rapped his glass on the table.

Aveline nodded. 

Varric slopped more wine into both of their cups and pushed Aveline’s back across the table. 

“What do you think?” Aveline asked, taking the newly-full cup in her hand and weighing it. She had to get back to the Keep to safeguard the peace, but she needed the drink more.

Varric shrugged lopsidedly, lolling against the wide arm of his chair. He stared at the red flush starting on Aveline’s cheekbones. They were braving the strange new world and a bottle together in his smoky suite. Fenris had disappeared into the night. Merrill was safely home. “I don’t know.”

The wine wasn’t making her drunk, but it was making her pensive. “You know, Donnic and I tried last year. For a baby. Not very hard, but - we were open to it, if it happened.” Aveline swirled her glass. “It didn’t.”

“Sorry.” 

“Don’t be. Some days I look at my recruits and I think, well, I’m already doing the job.” She set her glass down soundly. “Anders said if we needed help, he might be able to give it. Do you think he really…?”

“I don’t know what to think.” And he didn’t really want to think about it too closely. Varric sighed. “I shouldn’t have lost my temper.” 

“Hawke’s not the easiest man to love.” 

“Drove Blondie mad,” Varric agreed. 

Aveline smiled at the joke, but Varric didn’t join her. He was still frowning in thought. 

“I think they’ve both gone mad,” Aveline decided. She blamed herself. She had allowed Anders too much freedom, allowed herself to be too swayed by friendship. Mages needed diligence.

Speaking of. She looked regretfully at the wine still in her cup. “I should get back to the Keep.”

“It’s that bad?” 

“It’s not good.”

Varric drained his drink and set it aside. “I’ll join you.” 

* * *

Anders sat dry-eyed on his bed, with his knees drawn up and his arms clasped around them. His new things were in a heap on the floor. He huddled in his ratty smallclothes. A candle was burning on his bedside table, precarious in its little brass dish on the splayed cover of a book. Its flame flapped in drafts. The shadow of Anders’s nose danced to and fro, by turns hiding and highlighting his empty gaze. Two solid hours of silence had gone by. 

He wondered why he wasn’t crying. He had cried about smaller things than this. Yet all he felt was numb, utterly disconnected from the quick, thumping heart in his chest.

He laughed. It was an ugly sound, and he dropped his face against his knees to stifle it. Oh, Maker, help a poor fool. He was ridiculous. A martyr who couldn’t seem to die, a lover whose love was getting big with someone else’s child. 

And he wasn’t surprised. How could he be? Surprise needed faith. Trust. He had none in Hawke. 

Anders closed his eyes. Justice was close. Last night Anders had heard his voice, as clearly as if he had been in the very room. He was near, he would find his way back. Anders had been afraid of it, of taking up that fight again, but tonight he would welcome the battle and the defeat. He searched the black behind his lids, grinding his forehead against his kneecaps. Come on, spirit. Come and have me.

He heard the rap on his door. It was Hawke. Who else? But he felt nothing. The knock was like the knock on a neighbor’s room. Nothing to do with him. 

Hawke opened the door. Anders’s penchant for swinging it on its hinges had worn away some of the oil and it creaked. 

“You don’t usually knock on a cell door,” Anders said. 

“We’re back to that, are we?” Hawke asked. 

“What would you call this?” Anders mumbled. 

Hawke’s clothes rustled as he crossed the room. He was freshly bathed. Anders smelled soap and cooling lotion.

“I can’t hear you,” Hawke said roughly.

Anders unfolded his limbs, still feeling like a bystander, like a prop for Hawke’s theatrics, but he was tired and he wanted this over with. He dangled his feet off the edge of the mattress and sat hunched and round-backed, his chin tucked against his chest, staring at Hawke’s legs. “What do you want?” 

Hawke touched his shoulder and Anders drew in a pained breath. He was being pulled unwillingly back into his own body, out of the numbness. It was like being stretched on the rack, the way all the little aches came back to him, like small fires around that one, roaring agony in his chest. With Hawke so close, he couldn’t pretend. It hurt. It hurt so much he couldn’t see. It hurt that Hawke had been with the elf, and that every moment of their lives that hadn’t been a hell had been a _lie_ , and he pressed one hand to his face to shield his tears. 

“Let me explain -”

“I don’t want you to explain. I don’t care. Why didn’t you just let me _go_?” 

“Anders, listen to me.”

Hawke got to his knees, but there was nothing pious in it. It was the same aggressive look-at-me bullying, putting himself in front of Anders where he couldn’t be ignored. If that put him on his knees, so be it. He grabbed at Anders’s arms. He always needed people to look at him, like he was afraid of being forgotten. He was loud and he shoved and he wouldn’t be invisible.

Anders yanked his arms from Hawke and glared, teary-eyed, down the long bridge of his nose. “You weren’t going to tell me. What were you going to do? Wait and let the ears speak for themselves?”

“It wasn’t important,” Hawke said, and he had the audacity to reach for Anders’s hands again. 

“How can you say that?” Anders parried him, crossed his arms. Hawke, rebuffed, took loose hold of his sides, his hips, instead. He rested his elbows either side of Anders’s knees, locking his legs to the bed. It was half-embrace, half bind, Hawke holding Anders in place so he could plead.

“Humility doesn’t suit you,” Anders said.

Hawke felt Anders’s stark ribs under his palms. He was so slight, jagged, boney. Hawke looked him up and down, and his brown eyes were earnest. “No one thought you would live.” 

“There’s an excuse.” Teardrops fell on Anders’s folded arms.

Hawke followed the small, dark drops on the grey cotton. He spoke with a strain in his voice that came from his own pain, long unshed. “I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t eat. Every time I closed my eyes, you were here. _Breathing_ reminded me of you.” 

Anders sat motionless under the slowly-trickling tears, and Hawke gave him a squeeze, an embrace, and then he bent his head, burying it against Anders’s lap. His mind was full of things he hated, memories that weighed like the blood money he used to carry in his pockets. “I had to forget. I had to _try_.” 

“You loved me so much, you had to sleep with him,” Anders said sarcastically. He wiped his nose on his sleeve. “Is that why you spared it? Because it might not be mine? You’d carry that _beast’s_ babe...”

“I’ve made plenty of mistakes. Fine. Tell me what you want. I’ll atone for each one.”

“I don’t want you to atone. I don’t want you to beg. I don’t want to pretend I’m lord and master.” One hand fumbled toward Hawke but felt too heavy. It dropped tiredly to his lap instead. “I hate that I can’t trust you. I hate that I can’t even trust...” Hawke’s belly brushed against his legs. 

Hawke sank back and rested his head on Anders’s knee, the one that was healthy and cool. He touched Anders’s other knee, unbandaged and a little swollen, and let his hand fall down the scrawny, hairy shin. He buried his cheek against Ander’s thigh. “I wronged him. I wronged you. I don’t know how to make it right.”

Hawke’s line of beard tickled his thigh, prickly and thick like a paintbrush’s bristles. A wave of something like tenderness rolled through Anders, like thunder after the lightning, and before he could stop them his fingers had slipped into Hawke’s smooth hair. He gazed down at the top of Hawke’s head. He raked and made furrows in the black strands, parting them, opening small lines of paler skin hidden beneath. He stroked the hard, curved plates of Hawke’s skull and Hawke shuddered as cold fingertips reached the back of his neck. 

“What can I do?” Hawke asked.

“I don’t know.” Anders kept up the gentle grooming. Hawke’s hair was damp and unbraided. He channeled it between his fingers, gathering it up and brushing it out again.

“It’s yours,” Hawke said. “I swear to you.” 

Anders nodded sadly. He stroked the short hairs at Hawke’s temple. 

Hawke picked his head up, shaking off Anders’s hand. “It’s human. I’ll prove it. Could you tell, if I let you use... whatever you needed to?” 

It wasn’t a dirty word, magic, but for Hawke it was unsayable. Anders’s heart sank. So little had changed. He made himself nod. 

* * * 

A small mirror had been propped on the dresser, now that Anders didn’t seem like a threat to himself. Hawke turned the mirror face down. He decided to let Anders see the whole of him.

Anders watched from the bed as he undressed. He disrobed slowly: first his defensiveness, his ironclad strength, his sharp tongue. They came away like knives laid down at a meeting of peace. Hawke made himself defenseless. Then he slipped off his socks and pants and finally his shirt, after a slight hesitation and a quick tug, and he was naked. 

He crossed his arms uncomfortably, feeling oddly vulnerable in front of the man who had seen him in every little act of life. “What now?”

“Lie down.” Anders climbed off the bed and smoothed out the red coverlet. He stood aside as Hawke came over. Hawke hesitated in a timid, wary crouch, and then slowly uncurled on the bed, laying himself out like a sacrifice. Anders turned to the table to rummage among the dishes and books. 

He found a candle stub with a small twist of wick still gnarled at its end. He touched it to the flame, and set it beside its still-lit brother. 

The shadows melted off Hawke’s body, and Anders’s breath caught. He hadn’t seen Hawke bare in weeks, months, and his flesh was nothing like the granite rockface Anders remembered. Some of it was familiar - his health, the obvious power lurking in his shoulders and legs, sinewy forearms, the black hair between his thighs and his hooded length. The way he held himself was the same - even flat on his back, he held himself trim like a well-rigged ship. But there it ended, everything familiar was swallowed up by the new. 

Twenty weeks, Anders thought. And he looked every full minute of it. His rounded belly caught the candlelight, brown and golden like a full summer moon. Darker circles had formed around his nipples. They were hard in the cool air. The hewn lines of his chest were blurring into a softer scape. 

Anders set his fingertips against Hawke’s sternum, orienting himself with the map of his memories. Hawke’s body had been a series of plateaus, a drop from his wide, heavy ribcage to the channel of muscles down his lean stomach. The pads of Anders’s fingers lightly followed their familiar course. Hawke still had an outline of muscle just under his ribs, but it was a short, light groove soon lost to the bulge under his satiny skin. Anders traced the round, steep rise and came to rest at the dip of Hawke’s navel. It was getting shallow with the expanding pressure inside. 

“Seen enough?” Hawke asked.

Anders tore himself away. He was almost overwhelmed by the sight, by the way Hawke’s body had taken up its duty. How it had made room for the child, was making ready for the babe once it came. If Hawke was capable of that, of something so selfless...

“Go ahead,” Hawke urged. He trembled as Anders push back his sleeves. 

“I’m not going to hurt you.” 

“I know.” He was still uneasy. He hated magic. He hated the gap between cause and effect. Light or fire that came from nowhere - that broke all the rules. Deep down it made him feel panicky, like a horse trapped in a burning barn. (Almost as much as that, he hated the sanctified hush his father had built up around it. He and Bethany. They had spent all their time in a special bond of silence, and all Hawke had wanted as a boy was a glimpse over the walls.)

Anders spread his hands over Hawke. He reached for the gentlest magic he knew, the sort that needed love - love of anything, even just a scrap of it. There were mages who couldn’t find any. After so long and so much pain, Anders was afraid that nothing would come when he opened his hands himself - but the spell sprung to life. 

He used it to brush the little life inside, and his heart squeezed when the babe curled in response. Its life was so faint compared to the bonfire that was Hawke, his moving blood and working lungs, but it was real. Alive. “Human,” he reported. 

All human. He wondered what Fenris would say if he were here. If he knew he had just lost a child.

The spell hummed brightly. It was pleasant and warm, like lying in the sun, but Hawke stayed tense. Anders explored with brisk, neutral confidence, a shield of professionalism between him and the man he was examining. Stretched naked under Anders’s hands, and Anders so chilly and distant... Hawke licked his lips nervously.

“Your heart’s racing,” Anders observed. He was concentrating. His eyes were tightly closed.

“Is it okay?” Hawke asked. 

“ _It_ ’s a girl.”

Hawke started to say something, but whatever it was vanished without a sound. He folded one arm behind his head to prop it up, and looked down toward his stomach and Anders’s hands thoughtfully. He watched as Anders worked.

Anders noted, brief and flat: “She’s healthy.”

“I’m glad,” Hawke said quietly.

Anders’s eyes opened in surprise; he looked at Hawke, but Hawke was staring at himself, the light on his skin. Anders let the spell die. The light and warmth faded as he sank onto the edge of the mattress, exhausted.

Their vision adjusted to the candles. They both watched them flicker for a while, and Hawke finally sat up beside him. “Anders. I’m sorry.”

Anders nodded.

Hawke didn’t ask for forgiveness. That would be given in time - or not. It was enough that the babe was vindicated. “Can I put some clothes on?”

Another silent nod, without humor. Hawke got up and grabbed his clothes from the dresser. He went to the door. Anders’s bed was comfortable, but it wasn’t theirs. 

“Coming?” Hawke asked.

Anders dragged himself to his feet and followed.

* * *

“What’s the time?” Anders asked. He sat on their bed, fiddling with his nails as Hawke dressed down for sleep. 

With the chantry’s bell gone, Kirkwall’s hours had crept out of sync. Hawke looked at the sand-filled hourglass hung in his wardrobe.“Half past eight. Maybe a little after. Why? Off to the opera?” 

“No.” Now that Anders had seen beneath Hawke’s clothes, he was listless. “Varric was right. We should leave Kirkwall while you can still travel.” In another few weeks, they wouldn’t stand a chance. It would be hard going already. “We should go.”

Hawke turned around. “And do what? Go and be poor again?” 

“You could sell up the house.”

That put a spark to the charcoal-vein of anger that ran through Hawke’s soul, darkened him like a cloud moving in front of the sun. He lifted his palms, encompassing the room with its polished furniture, drapery, beautiful stone. “No one can afford to buy this place. The only people who could already have their own family heaps. All my money is tied up here.”

“All right, then don’t sell. We don’t need the money. There are worse things than - ”

 

“What would you know about it?” Hawke demanded. “If you’d just stayed in your tower, they would have fed and clothed you all your days.” Hawke had been poor, he had been used, he had done things he wasn’t proud of. He had won all of this, and he wasn’t going to let it slip away. He couldn’t go back to that life, to having nothing but his name.

“They feed and clothe prisoners,” Anders replied hotly, “And somehow nobody wants to go to jail.”

“You’ve never been poor enough, then.” 

Anders tore off the brittle, scaly edge of his thumbnail and spat it toward the fire. 

“I can’t,” Hawke said. The anger went out as quickly as it had flared. Hawke sounded … frightened.

Anders suddenly felt like a bully. If that was what it was... His voice grew soft. “I’ll keep you safe. I wouldn’t let anything happen to you. Either of you. And once the baby comes, we’ll...”

“What?” Hawke asked harshly.

“I don’t know. But I’ll be with you.”

Hawke rubbed his nose and mouth with his wrist. A little tic, when he was really unravelled, when his thoughts were bouncing like balls on a billiard table. There was a childishness about it that disarmed Anders, that told him Hawke wasn’t the beast of stone he pretended to be.

Hawke’s eyes were unfocused as his mind drifted back to Lothering, and to the constant fear that had always been with his family, strangling their roots before they could grow down into the soil. And then to this house’s foundation, made of the living rock of Kirkwall, and the echoes of his mother’s childhood in every beautiful corner. He wouldn’t let it fall into ruin again. “This was going to be _home_.”

“It was never going to be mine.” Not with Meredith, the templars, Justice, who and what he was and how this world worked. Anders looked at him sadly. “You must have known that.” 

“Maybe if you hadn’t...” Hawke gave up and groaned, or sighed. He exhaled in frustration and scrubbed his face with his hands. “Just go to sleep.”

“All right,” Anders said bitterly. Two steps forward, one step back.

They settled in an awkward, tense silence, both staring at their patch of wooden canopy, wordlessly grudging each other’s twitches and turns. It would be one of those nights, Anders thought wearily, when it was much worse to be together than apart. It went on for ten, twenty minutes, as the fire popped and crackled. He could tell from Hawke’s breathing that he was nowhere near sleep. He was turning, first one side, then the other. Crossing his legs, stretching them out.

Anders couldn’t stand much more of it - he was about to get up, slide out of bed and go back to his own room, when Hawke made an uncomfortable sound and sat up against the pillows. 

Anders was up at his side. “What’s wrong?”

“It...” Hawke grimaced and felt his stomach gingerly. 

“Does it hurt?” Anders was already folding down the blankets.

“No. It feels like she’s... moving.” Not the butterfly flutters of before - this was unmistakable, like popping a knuckle or being prodded with someone’s finger.

Anders relaxed. He almost laughed. “They move, Hawke. It’s normal. It’s good, it means everything’s well.”

Hawke looked down in distaste. “Can you make it stop?”

“She’s her own little person. Ignore it.” Anders almost asked - he wanted to feel. He held himself back. Instead, he fluffed Hawke’s pillow, and then his own, and forced himself to lie down again. 

A moment of quiet passed. Anders’s brain was alive with curiosity, joy, he couldn’t remember why he had been so angry -

Hawke sat up again. “I can’t.” He couldn’t ignore it. It felt too _strange_. And tomorrow, and the next, and the next, were going to be long days, and remembering Aveline and Varric and the hard words he had spoken, he was afraid he would face them alone. He smacked his pillow, taking out his frustration, channeling his fear, and firming it up in one go. 

“Don’t be mad,” Anders said. “Don’t worry about it.” 

Hawke shook his head. 

“Do you want something to help you sleep?” 

* * * 

In the kitchen, Anders set the fire and the kettle. He set his box of herbs on the polished counter, alongside two teacups and two porcelain saucers. He took a handful of black, dried tea leaves from their packet and dipped them into the just-steaming water to steep, and opened the herb box’s lid to survey the dried roots and leaves nested in their glazed compartments. He plucked one delicate, papery leaf from its red-veined kin and held it over Hawke’s cup. The steam curled up around it and Anders stared, thinking, weighing the delicate leaf that was light and thin as air and almost melting between his thumb and forefinger. Hawke wanted to sleep. Anders wanted him to sleep. Crossed motives, same ends. His conscience would survive.

He rolled the leaf between his fingertips, crumbling it to a fine dust that dropped into the murky tea and sank. He picked up both saucers and brought them upstairs. 

“Good,” Hawke said, after his first swallow.

Anders smiled between sips from his own cup. He waited until Hawke drained his, and took the dishes away as Hawke settled back against his pillows. 

“What are you staring at?” Hawke asked, when Anders had crawled back into bed beside him.

“You.”

Hawke quirked his eyebrows. He was already fading. The tea had worked wonders, he could feel it comfortably hot in his stomach. “Well then. Enjoy.” He stared vaguely ahead of him, and “Anders.”

“What?”

“Give me your hand.”

Anders held it out. Hawke tucked it under the edge of the covers, trapped against his stomach, and looked at him expectantly. “There. Moving again.”

Anders concentrated. Hawke breathed, his hand rose and fell with it. Nothing but Hawke’s warm and soft skin and the tautness of his stretching muscles. 

“You don’t feel that?” Hawke asked. He sounded incredulous and comfortably woozy. 

“Not yet. Soon.” She’d get stronger every day. It wouldn’t be long.

“Going to keep me awake,” Hawke groused. His eyelids blinked slowly once, twice, and closed.

Anders smiled gently. “I don’t think so, love.” He left his hand against Hawke for another minute or so, riding the rise and fall with each of Hawke’s deep breaths. He pulled the covers up over Hawke, peacefully limp, and gazed guiltily at his work. “Sleep well.”

* * * 

It wasn’t far off midnight, and down in his boarded-up clinic in Darktown, someone was slipping the nails out of their boards and settling in to wait. Anders went to his room and he dressed himself in Hawke’s gifts. For the past few weeks he had quietly strummed the old webs, sending out faint signals to reach anyone still alive and still in Kirkwall. Yesterday he had seen an answering signal, a flash of light as quick as a falling star, on the rooftop next door. Midnight, tonight, in one of the dirty corners where he had once plotted freedom.

Now he had risen from the dead and he would go back to them in splendor. Maybe in a century, two, when the chantry’s teachings had been burned to warm mage children in their unmolested cradles, history would make a legend of him. 

Aveline had put more men around the front door and down at the cellars as a precaution, but Anders had spent paranoid months learning Darktown’s rotting alleys. He went down into the house and was fixing one of Hawke’s knives into his belt when he heard the front door open. The guards admitted someone - it could only be Aveline, who else would have standing admission? He thought of Hawke upstairs, drugged and asleep. 

She must have come to apologize. Well, he would tell her to bugger off. 

He so convinced himself that it was Aveline that he didn’t rush. He turned around, ready to be particularly insolent, and saw Ser Cullen. 

Things moved very fast and very slow in Anders’s head. He could seize facts in an instant, even lots of shifting chaotic ones, but his expectations - those stuck like molasses, and for a moment Anders stared dumbly at him, and what he was thinking was that he must, _somehow_ , be Aveline. It didn’t make him look particularly bright, standing there gaping gormlessly at the Knight-Commander. 

Then he caught up with himself - the evidence was rather damning, really, incontrovertible when you stopped and gave it a good look: the cropped hair, the shoulders bulked to gorilla proportions by banded silver armor, and the chantry’s seal burned across his chestplate. Anders squeaked, and when that didn’t have the desired effect, that is, make the figure in front of him burst into flame, he panicked and thought he might rain fire on all of them and blow the house to ruin and take the Knight-Commander with it, or maybe just run up the stairs and hide under his bed. He was spared from making either not so brilliant choice by feet slapping down the stairs. 

He knew in the back of his mind that Hawke wouldn’t wake for hours, but he could hope. He looked over his shoulder. It wasn’t Hawke, miraculously risen: he saw the bulky, menacing shape of the mabari lumbering down the staircase. 

Dog reached his side and for once acted his role, raising his shoulders and snarling. An unlikely ally, but Anders shrank toward him. He took up a defensive place at the base of the stairs. 

“Any closer and I’ll feed you to the dog.” 

Cullen put his hands up at shoulder-height. “Listen to me, mage. I’m no threat.” Cullen eyed Dog very carefully. “The Viscount asked me to come.”

“He didn’t,” Anders said with absolute certainty. 

“He said you wanted this.” Cullen reached behind his back, eyes still fixed on Dog, muttering what sounded like “Good boy.” Dog rewarded him with a particularly deep growl. He quickly slid a staff out of its binding and held it out crossways to his body. 

Anders leaned forward curiously. The reddish wood, silver teeth grasping the end, sweat-stained leather wrapped around the grip, it certainly looked - he sensed it was no trick, it was his staff. Every mage could tell their own. It was a magnetic affinity, he could pick his out of a hundred like it. Cullen offered it like an olive branch.

Anders took the last step down to the landing, as Dog growled again. “Stay, boy.”

The mabari gave Anders an affronted look, just to remind Anders that he didn’t take orders from the likes of him. He would crouch here with his hackles up as long as he liked. 

Anders took a step forward and Cullen met him half way. Anders reached out, and Cullen let it go easily from his hand to Anders.

Anders weighed it, and brought it close, clicking against the floor. Yes, it was his. Really his. He had been off-balance, now he felt steady. He felt stronger. He didn’t even need to hide behind the dog. “Why have you really come?”

No gratitude for the templar. Cullen sized him up. He saw plenty of miserable faces in the tower - sullen, adolescent gloom at authority, resentment toward the Maker. All childish anger. Anders was stooped with a different sort of weight. A young man’s hatred, grown into a scarred man’s regret. 

“You asked me to,” Cullen said.

“What?” Anders furrowed his brow in confusion.

Cullen pulled a folded paper from his pocket. He held it up and Anders snatched it away. 

Anders unfolded it. It was his own coded message in ink, the one he had sent out yesterday. A decipherer’s pencil-work perched on top of his neat lines. He had been daring, he had asked for a meeting. And a templar had shown up on his doorstep.

Cullen watched him read. “Did you think your codes and whisper-games were too clever for us? We cracked them years ago. Half the time you thought you were writing to your comrades - you were writing to us.”

Anders balled up the paper in his fist. “You -”

“I didn’t think even you would be stupid enough to take it up again. After what you’ve done, after the mercey the Viscount has shown you - this is how you repay him?” Cullen asked in disgust. 

“Spare me your righteousness,” Anders snapped. “I’m not one of your apprentices any more.”

Cullen weathered a mage’s outbursts like a small child’s tantrums. He spoke firmly. “I still have my duty.”

“To hound me, to lock me away -” 

“To protect you.” 

Anders snorted. 

“There’s more going on than you know.” Cullen had the stern condescension of a father, a sanctimonious tyrant, a too-familiar tone that used to wear on Anders’s brain like a cheese grater. He saw Anders as he saw them all: less than a man, less than human. A desperately dangerous pet.

“Starkhaven’s storming. I can’t protect you if you’re here.” Cullen steeled himself. “I’ve come to ask you to return to the Circle.”

Anders laughed. His first reaction, the snap of shock and surprise and the absurdity, the absolute ignorance, the _arrogance_ of this templar, brought a dry bark bursting out of his throat. He laughed again as Cullen stood there poe-faced and severe. “ _No._ You’ve come to _ask_ me?” Another weird giggle. “Have you been gelded, Commander?”

Cullen made a sound deep in his chest. “You won’t be the only one to fall if Starkhaven comes.”

The laugh had re-ignited some of Anders’s fire. “Oh, don’t threaten. I always hated that. Grumbling at us like we’d forgotten your birthday. No. Please, ask me again. It was so much fun the first time.”

It really was Anders, the apprentice Cullen had known. He had been young, then, and Anders not much younger, but he had been like all mages. Childlike, somehow. Their emotions were too volatile, their spirits were too powerful. “Do you remember all the times we punished those who lied for you? Covered for you?”

Anders answered with an insolent little toss of his head. 

“Well, for once in your life, think of others. They’re after Hawke too. He won’t win with you around his neck.”

The smirk vanished from Anders’s face. 

Cullen sighed. He deflated a little. He was the weary parent, hoping he had finally gotten through. “I won’t compel you. I only _ask_ that...” 

Anders daggered him with a look. 

They were done here. Cullen had long ago learned when words had used up their worth. “I’ll show myself out. When you come, there’s no need to write first. The Circle has a place for every mage.”

Anders fumed until he reached the door. He called after him. “Your Circle isn’t going to stand, Commander.”

“We’ll see, mage.”


	16. Chapter 16

Hawke’s eyes flickered under his lids. His back was sore and he was dreaming.

He stood on a long flight of steps, thin and steep like the stairs between Lowtown and Hightown. They were endless, scrolling away into the gloom. He had to keep climbing. His heart was screaming at him to move, run, go. He looked over his shoulder down the stark white steps.

A four-legged thing was following him. It had white, curly hair and it made a piteous little bleating sound. It came toward him in a hobble, with each of its stick-like legs broken and its knees loose. One greenish eye was open and so was its mouth, hanging crooked on its hinges. It was dead. It was dead but it was following him.

Hawke turned and scrambled upwards, but time and space slowed around him. The stairs went on forever beneath his feet, he was getting no closer to the unseen top.

The lamb limped steadily after him, closing the distance one stair at a time. Its staring eye was leaking something thick and its gums were crimson red around its stubby teeth. Hawke tried to climb but the weight of his stomach dragged him down, like he was lashed to a boulder. He started to crawl. The lamb bleated again in a raspy voice and Hawke cried out, knowing he wasn’t making a sound, as it nuzzled its dripping face against his shoulder.

He inhaled sharply and woke himself up. Silver-grey dawn was just peeking around the curtains. For a few seconds, he breathed deeply in the cool air. The bed beside him was empty.

The fire was ash and embers. A shadow stood before it, twisted like a dead leafless tree, motionless. A shiver went through Hawke, raising the hair on his arms. He pushed himself upright.

“Anders?” he asked.

Anders moved stiff as a corpse. His head twisted around. His eyes were blue like the heart of a glacier, two blazing sockets in his skull of a face. He bared his greying teeth at Hawke.

Hawke’s heartbeat trilled, but he fought and mastered himself. He showed his teeth back at Justice and dredged up some of his bravado. “Oh, good. You’re back.”

Justice chattered like a wretched genlock. He had been far away, down dark paths full of brambles and claws that had left him ripped and torn. His nobility was in tatters, his spirit was shivering. He had found his way back and he was hungry for the heat of Anders’s blood. He was bathing in it, soaking in the mortal warmth, and jealous of it. He snarled as Hawke slid out of bed.

“ _No closer_ ,” Justice rasped.

“I’d forgotten how much I like being ordered around in my own house.”

“Leave us be.”

“No.” Hawke didn’t like the white-knuckled grip Anders had on his staff. (His staff? Where had he... but in the moment, Hawke was too distracted to give it a proper wonder.)

Hawke drew closer, ignoring the angry noises. He moved slowly, as one enters a pitch-black room and gropes for the guiding landmarks - a chair’s back, a dresser’s edge. Hawke sought his lover. Justice had come and gone the last weeks before the Chantry, never welcome, but Hawke always believed he could feel Anders, even when it was Justice working his mouth. Some part of Anders still there, still human, always waiting to come back.

Hawke drew close and searched Anders’s face for any sign of his mage, a hint of something warmer beneath Justice’s otherworldly light. Hawke’s skin prickled; he felt only the weird cold fire of a desperate spirit, as if Justice had burned Anders away, as if Anders had crumbled into nothing like a candle’s wick.

Justice snarled again. He swatted with the staff and Hawke caught it flat against his palm. He wrapped his hand around it bravely. He was lucky there was no magic in the swing.

Justice and Hawke stared at each other, and then, like a wild, wounded animal chased from its kill, Justice flinched. He slunk away. His fire faded with an angry, lingering resistance, and Anders’s eyes dimmed.

“Anders.” Hawke dragged the staff from Anders’s fingers. The hand fell back to Anders’s side lifelessly.

His eyes were empty. Hawke patted Anders’s face, his cheekbone, and used a thumb to wipe at the thin, frothy trickle at the corner of his blue-tinged mouth. “Anders, this isn’t funny.”

He wrapped his hand around Anders’s skinny bicep, and his back twinged at the thought - not so long ago, he would have scooped Anders up and dumped him in bed. He shook Anders’s arm. “Look at me.”

A tab fluttered at Hawke’s temple as his jaw worked. The baby fussed at him with her elbows and knees, woken by the pounding of his heart. If he couldn’t bring Anders back, if this was some sort of tranquility, if they were alone... He wished then that he had magic, not the templars’ hard lyrium that broke it apart, but a spell, one of those _things_ Anders did to reach the mad and wounded - anything was better than standing here pleading with a stiff, cold mannequin of a man.

A stupid idea struck him, one of those small absurd shadows that come with actual terror, as he stood there grasping at Anders.

Maker, it worked in the children’s stories, didn’t it? He felt a fool, and no prince in the stories ever had a body like this... but he leaned forward and kissed Anders’s just-parted, motionless lips. After all, it was the only magic he knew. 

Anders came back to himself like water poured into a cup. His body lost its hunch. A human expression filled out his face. He took in his surroundings, blinked, and looked to Hawke uncertainly. His mouth was tingling.

Hawke sighed and squeezed his shoulders, relieved. “Welcome back.”

Anders’s eyes filled. The light around the curtains told him he had lost hours and maybe worse.

“Don’t.” Hawke said. He felt Anders’s hands. When he was a boy, eight or nine, he had found a lamb in the field. It must have been sick. Left by its mum, it had curled up and been taken by the frost. With a child’s gruesome curiosity, he had used a stick to pry up its lid and poke its gummy, yellowish eye. He had rolled the body about, exploring this little death. He still remembered how hard and cold its flesh was, like the meat his mother kept in their ice chest. Some scrap of a dream came back and he rubbed Anders’s hands between his own, angrily, trying to chafe the cold out of them. 

Anders curled his fingers against Hawke’s warm palms, like small birds gathered under a mother’s wing, and his head sunk.

“You’re dressed,” Hawke said, trying to reconstruct what happened.

“I was going to go out.”

“Where?” Hawke asked sharply. He clasped Anders’s chilly hands.

“I don’t know. But then the Templar came. You asked him for my staff.”

Hawke glanced at it where it leaned against the wall.

“I don’t remember after that. I was furious. Just seeing him... It was like a beacon for Justice. All my anger drew him back. I hate them.” Anders swallowed. “I hate them more than I’ve ever hated you.”

“Well, that’s something.” Hawke smiled crookedly. Honesty from Anders. Shake him badly enough and the truth might fall out.

Anders turned away. He took a few unsteady steps toward the bed, changed his mind, drifted back toward the dead fire. He was mumbling to himself.

Hawke watched him move, jerky like a wind-up toy. He hated this more than he hated Justice. Anders having one of his moments was like a wheel without an axle - turning and turning and getting nowhere.

Hawke grabbed him and wrestled Anders’s eyes to his. They made a connection.

Anders’s eyebrows pulled together desperately. “I can’t control him.”

Hawke spoke sternly. “Then control yourself.”

For Hawke it was that simple. But simple didn’t mean easy. Anders stared at him hopelessly. “He’s changed. He...” 

Hawke squeezed his arm, a firm grip of command that stopped up a surge of blood then let it pound back toward his heart. “You’re back. That’s what matters. We’ll talk about it later. I’ve got to go.”

The light around the curtains was taking on a yellow hue as the sun climbed above the horizon. Anders trembled. “Where are you going?”

“The Keep.” Anders looked like a fox who had just heard the hounds and Hawke hated to leave, but the choice wasn’t his. He moved to unclasp Anders’s belt and helped him out of his coat.

Anders, shrunken with fear and grief, let Hawke steer him to the bed. He pried off his boots and curled up in the warm hollow left by Hawke’s body, and made himself small by pulling his arms and legs into his shirt. 

Hawke stood over him for a moment, covers in hand. His heart was crawling back into bed with Anders to hold him, but the world was pounding on their door. He flopped the blankets over Anders and went unwillingly to start his day.

* * *

Aveline was waiting at his office door. She was no fresher than last night, bruise-eyed, obviously hadn’t been to bed. She acted as if she had forgotten his strange news. She barely looked at him. She made her report and went away, and he didn’t see her again.

Lord Julius came hemming and hawing and presented more account books, his small face full of false regret. “The Treasury’s in such a state...” Hawke signed off on another round of auditing - who, what, why, he couldn’t quite follow, but Lord Julius wouldn’t leave without the signature. He signed, in the end, just to waft the odious man out of his office.

Early in the afternoon dispatches from abroad arrived. The dispatches were a letter chain from agents and Kirkwall’s interests up and down the Free Marches and further afield, gathered at the borders, sewn up under the Viscount’s seal, and forwarded on. Seneschal Bran sliced open the leather bag and papers spilled across his desk. Several aides went to work sorting, and Hawke grabbed up a handful himself. They were the usual; raiders and pirates on the waves, peasants grumbling in their fields, weddings in palaces. Most of the news wouldn’t be out of place in the gossip rags. Hawke skimmed until something caught his eye.

“What’s this about Ferelden?”

Seneschal Bran was primly arranging his stack of dispatches. “Unrest at the Circle. I heard some rumors myself.” Seneschal Bran had his own grapevine, and he guarded its fruit jealously. “There’s not much to go on, yet. I advise you ignore it.”

“Maybe it’s nothing,” Hawke agreed, unconvinced. The tension that had gripped Kirkwall had made its way abroad in the mouths of tradesmen and travelers, by post, maybe even by the earth itself, growing restless for change.

“In my experience, there’s no such thing as ‘nothing’ where mages are concerned. But it’s not yet our problem.” Bran sniffed. “More pressing is the grain rotting on our docks. There was a _sailor_ here yesterday.” His words twisted with a note of ‘and look what he left on the carpet’.

“Get it on ships, then,” Hawke said.

“Our captain friend had the same idea, but it seems his backers haven’t anywhere to send it to. Orlais and Starkhaven have both refused their autumn consignments.” Bran plucked up two of the dispatches in his neat stack and set them before Hawke.

Hawke read the cramped pages. “Our grain’s not good enough for them?”

Bran twisted his mouth. It might have been a smile, if the man were human. “Perhaps they’re afraid of heretical cakes.”

* * *

The sun moved across the quiet room as Anders waded through the foggy darkness inside. He wandered aimlessly as scraps of memory flashed to life like signal-fires. Justice had come back with bloody ideas, brutal thoughts, and Anders had been forced to watch them all, trapped in the pitch-black cave of his skull as Justice’s fantasies, mirages, nightmares, flashed in shadow and lightning against its walls. Men, templars, chanters, mages, innocents and guilty alike, Vengeance had visited them in a blood-splattered pageant that went on and on, playing out before Anders’s terrified eyes. Hawke had been there, too. Glimpses of him dismembered, dead, dying, always just-caught out of the corner of Anders’s eye. He couldn’t know if Hawke was the broken spirit’s true intention, hidden behind the passion and violence, or just an echo of his own dark hate. He wanted to die.

He was still in bed when Hawke returned, wide-eyed because he didn’t trust himself to sleep. He stared out between his fingers as Hawke let his armor clang on the floor, and sat down on the bed beside him.

Hawke sank gratefully onto the mattress. Anders’s eyes followed him and Hawke sighed to himself. His eyes were flat and dead, crusted with tear-trails, blood-red veins snaked across their whites. Hawke rubbed Anders’s shoulder through the blanket. At least he was warm.“Still with me?”

Anders nodded behind his hands.

“Sleep at all?”

Anders shook his head.

Hawke stroked down his back. “I want to ask you something.”

Anders turned his face toward him.

Hawke picked at his shirt with his fingers, tenting it so it wasn’t quite so round. “How is this going to work?”

Anders took a deep breath and sat up. There was still a future to think of. Within a half-year they would have a child, and they had barely talked of it at all. He laid Hawke down and felt out the babe’s lie.

Hawke listened without emotion as Anders spoke of muscles, blood, knives.

Anders touched Hawke with his thumb and forefinger, charting the two end points of an incision. “It won’t be pretty - it never is. But it’s over so quickly, Hawke. It’s almost nothing.”

“And then we’ll be a family.”

They traded a glance. There was no joy in it. Hawke looked down again and traced the invisible wound Anders had mapped across his belly. “I’ve heard they don’t even use knives in the Circle.”

“I can do it. I’ll keep you both safe.” Anders shivered. His head was spinning. When he took the stairs too quickly, he got winded. He was sick and weak, and Hawke had to trust him to be strong. “Trust me.”

Hawke’s face was oaken. He had been ordered into battles, both sure victories and hopeless causes. Whichever this was, when the time came, he would face it with the same strength.

And it was the future. Right now, the pillow under his head was soft and his back didn’t hurt much. “You know, last night was the best sleep I’ve had in months, but I don’t think I can get up again.”

Anders’s hand lingered on his stomach. “The babe’s going to grow fast the next few weeks. It’s no wonder you’re tired.”

“Great.” A spiteful glance at his middle. “I’ll look like a house, instead of a cottage.” He brushed Anders’s hand. It was warm, not cold. “It’s... really been a day, Anders.” 

That was how he asked for comfort. Not with his eyes, not in so many words. Anders smiled. “Turn over.”

Hawke did without complaint. Anders fit himself to Hawke’s back. “I wish we could stay like this forever.”

Hawke’s shoulders twitched as he snorted. “We’d get hungry.”

A moment of silence.

“Does it feel real?” Anders asked.

“No.” The backaches were real enough. Being hungry at all hours, day and night. Feeling jabs and prods, almost pissing himself when she landed an elbow or a knee right on his bladder. That was all real. But the rest of it, a baby, a family, a future... Hawke pulled on Anders’s arm, wrapping Anders tighter against his back like a blanket. “It’s not just you.”

Anders laughed weakly, a short chuckle finished with a frightened sniff. “I was worried.”

Hawke didn’t laugh. Anders hadn’t meant him to.

“He’s different. He’s not even Vengeance, now.” Anders’s voice shook. “He hates you, Hawke. What if he hurts you? What if he...” Anders grasped Hawke protectively, clamping his hand to the swell where their baby was sheltered.

“You’ve never hurt me,” Hawke said, taking Anders’s trembling hand. “You never will.”

“I don’t know,” Anders said, almost a whisper.

And no sleep came. Hawke squeezed his hand and they watched the dark.

* * *

Anders tried to swallow his worries, go on as he had been, but it was impossible. Every time Hawke looked to him, it was with fear. He woke sometimes to find Hawke deep in thought. Not the glaze-eyed, blank look of a daydream, but troubled, frightened staring, and always at _him_. Whether Hawke was afraid to sleep beside Anders, or afraid to wake up next to Justice, Anders didn’t ask. He pulled away. He went back to the guest room with its barred windows so Hawke could rest. 

He needed it. Anders was right, the babe was ready to grow. A week later his armor didn’t fit, and Anders convinced him to order new shirts before those stopped fitting, too. It was cool enough for a mantle and his robes of office, maybe that spared him the worst staring, but he was sure he was getting bigger by the hour. That’s what it felt like, anyway. Bigger and slower. The growing struggle to do up his buttons every morning told him time wasn’t on his side.

But he was a fool if he thought anyone, anything, was on his side. Nothing and no one was on his side. Hawke had always burned goodwill like kindling, sure he would never need it, sure that when all else failed, he was strong enough to get his way. But now he was afraid of the thing inside of him and the thing inside of Anders, and there was no one to turn to.

Maybe one.

Fenris’s broken mansion was lifeless. The window frames and the doorway’s arch had a shrunken, naked look, like so many bleached bones on the Wounded Coast. Hawke pulled himself up the stairs.

Fenris heard him coming, even without knocking. Hawke paused at the top of the stairs to catch his breath back and Fenris came to have a look at him.

“What are you doing here?” Fenris demanded.

Hawke pushed off the railing. “I came to talk.”

“Then you’ve wasted a journey.”

Hawke followed him into his room, ignoring the reproof, the cold wall of Fenris’s thin back. “I came to tell you. It’s not yours.”

“I never thought it was,” Fenris said coldly. It was impossible, unless things worked very differently for humans.

Hawke thought it over, and he grew as stormy as Fenris, embers to the elf’s ice. “Then why bring it up? You hate him so much, you had to tell him about us?”

“You wouldn’t have,” Fenris snapped. “Why the secrecy, Hawke? Are you ashamed?”

“I’m not ashamed.”

“You act like it.”

“Can I sit down?” Hawke asked. His back was getting tight. Some nerve was pinching, making his leg tingle and ache. 

Fenris gave him a look that said he didn’t care. He wouldn’t care if Hawke fell through the floor or the roof caved in. He watched Hawke sit carefully, favoring his back, and his glare narrowed.

“Not even the magisters made children with magic.”

“He’s not one of your magisters.”

“You should have let us deal with him. They say once a mage turns to blood magic...” Fenris didn’t know why he pressed. Why slip the flat of his blade into the cracks and rock them apart. Maybe to free himself - he was trapped between Hawke and his mage, they were crushing the life out of him. “Look what he’s done to you, Hawke.”

Hawke glanced down at himself and back to Fenris.

Fenris sneered. “I wish you luck. I think you’ll need it. I’m leaving.”

“When?” Hawke asked.

“Tonight.” He couldn’t live with Hawke hanging over him. He should have gone weeks ago, before Hawke came looking... vulnerable.

Hawke followed Fenris as he moved. The crumbling mansion had never been a home. Fenris was a ghost here, sleepwalking in the dust of things abandoned. Yet he moved around the room in quick, short bursts; he was tearing himself up from whatever had grown here, uprooting. It was hurting him, like twisted, pale things pulled out of the ground and left to burn in the sun.

“Fenris, stay. Just a few more weeks.”

Fenris came back to the fire, standing opposite Hawke, grasping the empty chair. “Why should I?”

“I need you.”

Fenris’s hands spasmed around his chairback. “Damn you, Hawke.” He wished he had stayed an animal; animals didn’t know their own suffering.

“I’m sorry,” Hawke said.

“You’re ‘sorry’. You’ve probably said the same to your mage. You want both of us,” Fenris accused, acidly.

“I need you. Both of you. You can’t imagine what this is like.”

Fenris glared in disgust at Hawke’s body, the roundness nestled at his lap. “It’s his babe. Let him protect you.”

“He can’t.” Their enemies weren’t Coterie thugs, slavers, nameless troublemakers. They were the men who owned Kirkwall, owned the ships that carried her trade, held her purse strings. They were Starkhaven, Starkhaven’s prince, the Divine herself - Anders had been tried in absentia, found guilty, she demanded Kirkwall give up his sanctuary. So many hands around Kirkwall’s throat, and Hawke felt every finger squeezing.

And the people of Kirkwall were starting to feel it, too. The flow of coin and goods was drying up. Winter had just begun.

And he couldn’t confess any of this to Anders, he couldn’t let the facade slip. Not for a moment. Anders wouldn’t survive it. The end was rushing at them so fast, and he didn’t know if he had the strength to face it. “I don’t know what we’re going to do. Please, Fenris.”

Fenris growled and damned him again, more ferociously this time. “I would be gone from here. But now you ask the world of me, because you know -”

“Fenris -”

“Because you know that I cannot deny you. If I killed you I would be free - and it would be the death of me.”

Hawke gazed back steadily. His conscience, if it still lived, didn’t bow his head. He had poisoned the earth they stood on. The only fruit between them was twisted and blackened, instead of sweet smells it breathed anger that made the air bitter. “I wasn’t strong enough to choose. I wanted you both.”

“The choice isn’t yours anymore. That must be a relief.” Fenris had not a drop of kindness.

Hawke looked down again. “What if I said I was wrong? What if I told you he did this to me against my will. That I was afraid of him. What would you do?”

“Throw you to the wolves.” Fenris turned away from him, once and for all. The moon shone in the window’s cracked glass.

Hawke got to his feet. He was awkward and slow about it. Fenris stared out the window.

“Are you afraid of him?” Fenris asked, when Hawke had almost reached the door.

Hawke looked back across the broken room. “Yes.” 

* * *

Varric nodded to the guardsmen at Hawke’s door. They were pulling double duty these days, keeping the apostate in and keeping angry citizens out. Varric had never trusted uniforms, but these guys were all right. He’d made sure of that. (Coin was heavy, oaths were not. Unless you were Aveline. But not many people, in Varric’s wide experience, were anything like her.) He ducked inside. The place had the gloominess and dust of an old man’s shop. The drapes were pulled tight over the windows, the dust was building up. No one cleaned the fireplaces. The place smelled of old ash and dust, like they had taken his advice and run.

No such luck. Anders was waiting for him at the bench in the main hall. He had picked up where Sandal left off, making an inspired mess of things. Varric cleared his throat and Anders turned around, splashing a pot of something black and sticky onto the table.

“Careful with that, Blondie,” Varric said.

Anders grabbed a cloth to sop at whatever it was. “You startled me.”

Varric’s eyebrows went up. “Sorry.”

“Thank you for coming.”

“Of course. I don’t have anything better to do in the middle of the day than visit possessed mages in their … creepy lairs.” Varric looked around the dim hall with a grin.

The grin was hollow. Anders didn’t smile back. He wasn’t up to playing pretend. He had lost Varric’s friendship and he didn’t have it in him to care. “This will only take a minute.”

A minute and a half, as he brought the sticky stuff to a boil and dropped in a little more of this and that. A tiny crystal of lyrium, handled with his bare fingers, was like grabbing a shard of ice. He dropped it into the sludge. The black boiled out of it, curling into the air in a tendril of greasy smoke, leaving a pure, golden oil behind. He poured it off into a small, scratched-up phial, and stoppered it with a bit of old cork. He turned back to Varric.

“Will you keep this for him?” Anders asked.

Varric took the bottle. He tilted it, examining the pearly oil in the weak light. “It won’t explode, will it?”

“No,” Anders said humorlessly.

“What is it?” Varric asked.

“Hawke will know. Please, Varric. Just keep it. He’ll need it.”

“All right. Consider it kept.” Varric tucked it into his sleeve. Safer than a pocket - whoever heard of having your sleeve picked?

Varric tried smalltalk, but Anders was tired, as if his duty was finally done. He left the mage slumped at his bench.

* * *

From Hawke’s estate to Hawke’s office, feeling the little bottle jostle against his elbow as he walked. He wasn’t looking forward to the visit. He’d learned a lot about how Kirkwall worked the last few weeks - nothing new, if you had eyes and ears and half an imagination, but the novelty was in the specifics. Who owned what. And who. He rapped on Hawke’s door. It was like visiting a zoo. Hawke might as well be their dancing bear, for all the power he had. 

“Varric,” Hawke said when the dwarf came in, looking like he’d expected something much worse.

“Hawke.”

Silence. If they hadn’t parted on good terms, they weren’t meeting on them, either.

“How you been?” Varric wasn’t one to get angry, but he wasn’t one to be ordered out of someone’s house, either. “House nice and quiet?”

It would be a cheap snipe from anyone but Varric, at anyone but Hawke. Hawke took it like an honest blow, the kind between friends. “I’m sorry. I was...”

“Nevermind, Hawke. We were all a little...” Varric grinned, almost a genuine one. They’d been dropped in weirder shit... but not much.

“You should visit. We haven’t seen anyone but Merrill. The wine cellar’s going to waste.”

“Been a little busy, Hawke. Starkhaven’s being really arsey about Guild goods. You really pissed them off.”

“Only their prince.”

“That’s enough,” Varric said. He wasn’t joking. His bottom line was taking a hit, and if he was suffering, Kirkwall was suffering. Not everyone in Kirkwall was as forgiving as Varric, when they saw the coin drying up... and even old time’s sake had a best-by date.

Hawke caught his seriousness and exhaled softly. “So. To what do I owe the pleasure?”

“Anders is acting strange.” No nickname. Wouldn’t want Hawke to get _confused_.

“What’s he done?” Hawke asked, and Varric saw his shoulders fall, the tiny flicker of energy replaced by total, leaden weariness.

“He gave me this.” Varric fished in his sleeve and held the phial up between his fingers. “Said I should keep it for you. He said you’d know what it was. Any ideas?”

Hawke sighed. “No idea.”

“Keep an eye on him,” Varric suggested.

Hawke nodded, resigned, and Varric felt sorry for him. It was like standing on a frozen pond watching a man struggle under the ice, helplessly, because the ice was too thick to crack. He was tired. He was big at the stomach. He looked like any second he would give up and sink away into the darkness. It was hard for Varric to look at him.

“So I’ve been playing conspirator,” Varric said, looking away. He had wined and dined anyone he could get his hands on, playing wannabe collaborator, trying to trace what Hawke was up against.

“What did you find?”

A lot of walls. Viper smiles. Dead ends. These were noble games and casteless dwarves, even very rich ones, weren’t invited. “Not much. Just that you probably don’t have as long as you think.”

Hawke gave a gallows smile, as if Varric had made a dark, dark jest. “I don’t think we’ve got long at all.”

“Then why stay?" Frustration cramped his broad voice. "Take Blondie and disappear.”

“They won’t let us.”

“Who?” Varric asked impatiently.

Hawke touched a heavy, rolled scroll of paper on his desk. It had the Divine’s seal. “What do you know about the Seekers of Truth?”

Varric caught a glimpse of something even bigger on the horizon, enormous and terrible, and he braced his hands on the desktop. “Hawke, get out of here. I’ll make sure you’ve got enough coin to get to Ferelden. Wherever you want to go. Tell me.”

Hawke’s mouth curled at another joke no one had made. “It’s too late.”


	17. Chapter 17

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> N.B. As per the original kinkmeme brief, lactation!kink.

It snowed. It was an early snow, signalling a bad end to a troubled year. The grey afternoon sky crowded in, sinking down over Hightown’s spired and vaulted rooftops, and at dusk the heavens opened over Kirkwall. The first fall of the season, sturdy flakes that didn’t melt for ages and clung like regret.

With no servants to think of the fires, the estate took in the cold like a lover.

Hawke came from the Keep not long before dusk, sopping wet from the short walk. He closed the door, shook the snow off of his wrap, and called for Anders. Dog crept down the stairs, but no mage. Hawke, still holding the wrap at his throat, made a short search for Anders. First in the kitchens where he lit the stove, grabbed a handful of spiced pecans to munch, and left Dog gnawing a hunk of dried roast. Then he searched the master bedroom, where he clumsily got down on one knee to start the fire, then the library and guest rooms. They were all empty.

A draft in the hall tickled his legs, and Hawke followed the cold little stream of air up the narrow, steep stairs to the top of the house.

Hawke got to the top of the stairs and stopped for breath. He hit cold air like a wall, it enveloped his face and hands and made him shiver, and the babe startled inside. That strange cohabiting feeling sent a different sort of shiver through him. She was becoming something he couldn’t ignore; she was getting too strong, and too _real_ , when he felt her jump at a slammed door, or a raised voice in the office, or just his own worried, thudding heart. He touched his stomach to reassure her - or himself - and took a few steps onto the landing.

The top floor had a balcony that bridged the street in a stretch of masonry, ending in the plain, blunt wall of the neighboring manor. The little bridge had a tile roof, held up by sturdy columns. It was lined with benches that were old and scarred, and was filled with wasps and lightning bugs in the summertime. It was a place to have drinks and look down on the plebs. The door to that place above the street was ajar and trails of snow blew in like the ash that had buried Lothering. Hawke pulled the door open.

Anders stood at one of the empty arches, in nothing warmer than his shirt and feathered jacket. He was facing away from the wind, looking toward the Viscount’s Keep. 

“Anders?”

“It’s me,” Anders assured him. As if he could be sure.

“What are you doing?” Hawke asked, raising his voice as he joined Anders in the weather.

“Thinking about jumping.” The wind almost whipped his words away.

Another gust of wind coursed through the arches. Hawke crossed his arms, pulling his wrap tighter. Anders stared ahead, unblinking, as if his eyes had frozen open in the cold.

Hawke’s wrap was heavy fur and satin, the sort of wrap a king took on campaign. It was large enough for two. Or three. Hawke threw one end around Anders’s shoulders and drew it closed, enfolding them both together in the thick fur. They stood side by side in the worsening storm and watched the city sink.

Hawke wondered if Merrill was safe at home. He wondered if Fenris had stayed and if he had, was he warm enough.

The snow crashed against their backs. It piled on the streets, burying the cobblestones and gutters. Windows sprang to light as the sky turned black.

Hawke watched the shapes scurrying below. Innocent people, oblivious, not yet starving. He thought of the Divine’s demands, and Starkhaven’s equal threat, to come in force and come soon. Hawke knew they would come; Vael was a faith-fired demon of a man. And _they_ would come first - the Seekers of Truth, to prepare the way. To watch.

They might be inside the city already. Hawke’s eyes flicked between the figures on the street. That one in the dark cloak, who moved through the snowstorm with searching looks instead of the bent, huddled rush of someone homeward bound. The shadowy sentinel in the alley, upright and motionless even as the wind swept through...

A squad of templars drew his eye as they passed, hurrying back to the docks before the storm got worse. Hawke’s heart went out to them. They would be trapped in their tower until the weather lifted, locked up with what they feared most.

Anders listed against his shoulder.

The last few stragglers struggled by as the fall became a blizzard. The sky turned upside down - the obscured sun set, and the light on the thick clouds came up from below, from Kirkwall’s lamps and orange fires. The snow soaked up every sound and the streets fell into glowing, ghostly silence.

Hawke and Anders stood until their hair was stiff with ice and they had lost sight of the street to a whirling, white maelstrom. When it got too lonely, like standing on the deck of a ship lost in the fog, Hawke wordlessly drew Anders inside.

* * *

In the bedroom, their bedroom, they peeled off their sodden boots and trousers and cast them aside. Anders’s nose was red and chapped from the cold. His hair dripped with melting ice. Hawke pulled off Anders’s longshirt, the last of his clothes, and his eyes gathered up Anders’s scarred body. The fire light made the skinny mage glow like an oil painting, black shadows and milk-white skin. Hawke stroked the angle of his hips and tested the strength in Anders by pushing him back. He gave easily. Hawke pulled him back in.

The touch of Hawke’s hands roused him from the dull, dreamy hypnotic of the snowstorm, and Anders gripped Hawke’s strong arms gently. He looked with soft longing at Hawke, still buttoned up in his thick overshirt and leggings. He wasn’t brave enough to reach for the buttons.

They embraced. Anders turned his head to see their shadows tangle and merge on the bed; Hawke’s was stretched and round, his was too thin. They didn’t fit together. He leaned around Hawke’s stomach and tucked himself under Hawke’s arm, his naked body against Hawke’s clothed one.

Where their bodies were pressed together, Anders felt a sudden jab. Then another. It took him a moment; it wasn’t Hawke pushing him away, it wasn’t Hawke excited -

“I can feel her,” Anders said, awe making him stupid, forgetting that Hawke surely felt it too. The motion against his own stomach was small and sweet, like Ser Pounce-a-lot creeping into his robes and getting comfortable. The same close feeling, another being right beside his skin, small and determined and too precious for words. She turned again, and Anders couldn’t stop himself pressing his hand on Hawke to feel the next flutter. This was their baby. This was _real_. “I can feel her.”

“I thought you might,” Hawke said. He fit his hand over Anders’s, trapping it against him.

Anders gave Hawke a quick look, asking for permission - Hawke shrugged minutely and Anders peered closer at the miracle under his hands. Hawke’s stomach was rounded like a bulging water skin, firm and round, with only a little give. And so _warm_.

“Here,” Hawke said.

Hawke gave gentle pressure, pushing Anders’s hand in. Little feet shoved back, struggling against Anders’s palm with a strength that made his heart stretch. He looked worriedly at Hawke, as if he’d just been handed a gift he wasn’t sure was for him.

Hawke smiled crookedly. “She fights back.” 

A smile on Anders’s own dry lips. She was like Hawke already.

At that thought, sudden tears welled up and overran. Anders yanked his hands away to catch their fall.

“What’s wrong _now_?” Hawke gaped helplessly - he hadn’t said anything, he hadn’t _done_ anything - Maker’s _sake_. “I give up, Anders.”

“I’m sorry,” Anders managed, ashamed of himself for making them both unhappy. No, that was wrong. They were already unhappy - always. He had just reminded them. “I’m sorry,” he said again.

“What’s the _matter_ with you?” Hawke demanded.

Anders wiped away his stupid tears. More came. The matter? what was the _matter_? - the matter - it was so many things, and it was only and most - “I don’t want to go.”

“Go _where_? Andraste’s tits, Anders, what is going on?” Hawke grabbed his shoulder roughly. His thumb dug into the joint and made Anders wrench.

“Please -” Anders tried to curl against him; he wanted Hawke’s arms around him again, but Hawke held him at stiff arms’ length and let him shiver in the cool air. Anders clutched a hand to his chest, as if that was where Justice lived, the seat of all his pain. “He’s too strong. I can’t control him. He warned me, when he was still my friend.”

Anders had been adrift, causeless, selfish, small. Justice had made him into something better. And now Justice was Vengeance, uncontrollable, hungry, eating him alive, from the inside out. And all Anders wanted - _really_ wanted, the part that was still Anders, human - was to stay with Hawke and see this through. He wanted to hold Hawke while it snowed and feel how heavy he was with their child. He wanted to see their baby. He wanted to keep her _safe_.

\- Because she would be alone when he was gone. Hawke wouldn’t be able to help her. She would be a mage: Anders was sure of it, he was terrified of it, and he didn’t know what this world had in store for her. He had changed it, but had he made it better? For all the babes in arms, hearing a mother’s song and murmurs from beyond the Veil? The boys and girls hiding from their parents in the cold barn, playing with sparks of light in the dark? Had he doomed them all, when he doomed himself?

He couldn’t know. He reached for Hawke again.

Hawke headed him off, grabbing one of his wrists. He yanked Anders closer and bored into his eyes. “What did you give to Varric? Why?”

Hawke twisted his wrist with the same angry pressure of old. But Anders had had his revelations, he had seen deep into Hawke. Maybe as deeply as Hawke had seen into him.

He had seen that for Hawke, fear always came wearing anger’s mask. Anders stopped fighting Hawke’s vice, the anger that wasn’t really. His fingers went slack. “It’s for you.”

“What is it?”

Anders hung his head. “It’s what they use in the tower. If they find a boy and a girl together. If it isn’t her first time. It stops there being any worse trouble.”

“What does it _do_?” Hawke twisted his wrist for an answer.

“It brings on a bleed. And...” This potion, with this potency, would do more than that. “You’ll be barren.”

Hawke’s brows tightened in surprise.

Anders sighed. The potion was an evil thing. It had hurt to make it. He had seen it poured down girls’ throats until they choked. But for Hawke, for the evil Anders had to done him, it would help make it right.

“Drink it and you won’t have to worry,” Anders said, looking down at Hawke’s still-buttoned shirt, bowed like a laden hull. “No matter what you do... who you do it with... this will never happen again.”

Hawke looked down too.

Anders spoke softly. “It’s the best I can do.”

“Why Varric?”

“Because he’ll be here, even if I’m… when I’m… What would your life be, if you hadn’t met me?” Anders suddenly wondered. He wanted to know that this wasn’t the hell he thought it was, that he hadn’t ruined the man he loved.

\- Yes, damn everything else, he _loved_ Hawke. And he had destroyed him. He had been so sure, before, that any blood was worth shedding. That any sacrifice, willing or not, was just. But on the other side, after all of Justice’s rage had come to nothing but a scar over his heart, he didn’t have that faith. He had thrown Hawke’s life away for nothing. 

All of their lives. He screwed his eyes shut in pain.

Hawke grasped him again, gently this time. He soothed Anders’s shoulder where he had bruised it and curved his thumb down to the jagged line on Anders’s chest.

“I tried to live without you, Anders. What I learned was... I don’t want to.”

Anders bowed his head. He leaned in again and Hawke didn’t stop him. Anders fit his nose against Hawke’s throat, close enough to smell the scent rising at his collar, the thick must of a day’s sweat. Hawke’s breath had a light touch of cinnamon.

They stood together for a long, quiet moment, two small figures in the high-ceilinged room, while the fire spit and snow hissed at the windows.

Hawke’s arms wrapped around his back. It had taken them years to learn to be gentle to each other. Anders hid his face against Hawke’s neck and thought of the nights when he would have given anything Hawke asked, just to be held like this.

Maybe it wouldn’t have made a difference. He had been damned long before he met Hawke. But at least he would have been happy. For a while.

He closed his eyes and confessed. “When we met, you didn’t seem to care what I was. At first I thought it was because you were kind. Because you understood. When I learned how you really felt... that you didn’t care, because you didn’t care about me, or anything I stood for... I started to hate you.” Anders smiled, pressing his smooth teeth against Hawke’s neck. Hawke flinched.

“It was easier after that,” Anders said, with the same bitterness in his voice. “I thought, ‘If Justice kills him, he’ll deserve it.’ And I didn’t feel guilty any more.” 

“Guilty?” Hawke asked.

It was like clinging to masonry, holding on to Hawke. Marble and stone. “For using you. For needing you.” Anders drew away. “How long would I have lasted in Kirkwall without your name to hide me?”

“That’s all I was to you?” Hawke’s eyes scoured his.

Anders smiled in his sadness; maybe that was how he registered despair. “When did you ever try to be more?”

Hawke went deathly still. (For the first time, Anders thought; for the first time, Hawke was wondering what they could have been.)

“All those times I was afraid of you...” Anders said. “And now you’re afraid of me. And you should be.” He touched Hawke again, his stomach. Heated, full - the babe didn’t like his touch and twisted away.

Afraid of him, just like Hawke.

Maker, what a happy family.

Hawke glanced down his body, to where Anders’s white hands held him. “Was it blood magic?” he asked.

“Yes.” Anders cradled Hawke’s waist, his stretched shirt. “But how can this be evil? How can this be wicked? She’s our baby, Hawke.”

The apple in Hawke’s throat bobbed.

“Do you feel any wickedness here?” Anders asked. He didn’t. He felt Hawke, and their child, two lives in one. He felt Hawke’s strength and the furnace where the babe was growing, humming, like shuttles flying on a loom. It was strange, and it was beautiful. It wasn’t evil. If Hawke would only _understand_ that...

Hawke looked unconvinced. He had scraped his cheeks clean that morning, like a youth, but this late in the day black stubble was shadowed around his mouth. The edge of his white teeth pressed against his lip.

Anders couldn’t bear the doubt on Hawke’s face; he suddenly kissed the rasping, prickly skin, and then found Hawke’s soft mouth. Hawke inhaled in surprise, but Anders snaked a hand into his hair, keeping him close. He pressed gently, insistently. He breathed over Hawke’s lips like a warm ghost. A brush of life. Another kiss. Hawke’s tongue curled to meet his.

And Anders had to marvel: Hawke might fear him, but he was always so ready to trust _this_.

Anders closed his eyes; he rubbed at Hawke through his leggings, cupping the heavy shape of his balls until he felt the hardening flesh above them. He bit down on Hawke’s lower lip, pinning it gently between his teeth. He pulled. The bulge twitched under his hand.

“Was it a bad day?” Anders asked. He felt bone-deep weariness in Hawke, as if his flint had worn out. 

“There aren’t any good ones.”

A bad joke, right here - something about a ‘happy ending’ - another Anders, in another lifetime, would have said it and let Hawke laugh. But this, here, now, felt deadly serious, tired and heavy. It was joyless, it was brutal - but that was their sort of love.

Hawke reached around Anders and set his hand on the base of Anders’s spine, pressed his hand all the way up to his neck, scouring the ridges as he went. He grabbed the band holding Anders’s stub of a ponytail and dragged it out of his hair. One quick tug; a few loose hairs snagged and pulled with it, Anders winced, Hawke pulled til they broke and the band came free. He let it drop. The moment when Anders’s hair fell around his face, when his eyes were suddenly framed by that pale reddish-gold, blazing like a copper kettle in front of the fire - Hawke lunged and captured his mouth because he was beautiful, and beauty was something to possess.

Anders turned his head, put his fingers up to ward off Hawke’s lips. He gave Hawke a jostling rub, just this side of rough, earnest, somewhere between boys tussling and grown men making love. 

Hawke grunted and he started to enjoy. Loosen. His joints unwound and he leaned toward Anders. Anders joined his kiss while his two hands pulled open Hawke’s strained laces. Hawke’s shirt was tucked in; Anders pulled it free of the breeches and slid his hand in to find Hawke’s cock.

Anders ran his hand lovingly over Hawke, wrapped him up with a warm hand, and fished him out of his clothes. He let go of Hawke and let the chilly room do some of the work for him, make Hawke quiver and want him as the cold air touched his flushed skin, while he turned his attention elsewhere. He gave Hawke kisses that made him burn, scratched through Hawke’s sleek black hair, furrowed behind Hawke’s ears. Little places that Hawke liked - needed - to be touched. He used the brittle edges of his nails to rake gently down Hawke’s neck to his collar, over the beating pulse in the hollow of his throat, and soothed the scratches with gentle kisses. 

Hawke’s mouth against his again. Anders took him in hand and stroked with a familiar grip. Hawke grew in his fist. The rest of him was dead weight, hanging against him, gasping over Anders’s naked shoulder.

“Come to bed,” Anders said. He was afraid Hawke’s knees would give.

They left the fire. They had their own heat, now. Hawke sat down heavily on the edge of the bed and Anders helped him with his leggings.

Hawke had tossed his snow-crusted wrap across the bed. The fur hit the back of his thighs, his buttocks, his spine as he settled on the mattress. Icy snowflakes sunk into his skin and his whole body shuddered as Anders followed him.

Anders’s rough knees hit the soft fur and he leaned over Hawke, searching out his steely erection again. Anders slid his hand around the blood-warmed skin, and felt Hawke clumsily grope under his shirt to return the favor. He squeezed Hawke fondly and Hawke groaned against his lips, a deep and vibrating sound that made his heart spur.

“Get something,” Hawke said tightly.

Anders slipped off the bed while Hawke arranged himself in a comfortable slouch, a cushion propping up his hips.

Anders came back and perched over him, and they looked at each other like two men clinging to the wreckage.

Hawke made the first move, reaching out to Anders with a heavy hand.

“If you knew how much I missed you...” Hawke ran his hand over Anders’s bare and goosefleshed arm, eyes glued to the scar his sword had left.

Anders watched Hawke’s dark, remembering eyes. It was so easy to forget how _young_ he was. Anders had some years on Hawke, years that had been stretched into lifetimes by their suffering - and Justice, timeless Justice, had made him ancient. It was hard to remember, when Hawke was bruising and snarling - hard to see the _youth_ Hawke still had in him. There was time left for him. Time to change, even.

Anders stroked Hawke’s lineless cheek and smiled sadly.

“Don’t go,” Hawke said, looking up at Anders like a beggar.

“I’m here.” Anders rested his hand on Hawke’s abdomen. Six months gone, and they both seemed healthy; but Anders was waiting, always, for the thread to come undone, for the other shoe to drop. (For the templars to ride into the village square, for the so-called friend to tell them where to find you.) “How are you feeling?”

“Fine. Just...” Hawke shrugged his shoulders. He didn’t want to talk about it. “Fine. We’re okay.”

She turned over or stretched, and together they watched Anders’s hand rise and fall with the motion.

“Can I?” Anders asked, teasing with the strained button near his fingertips.

Hawke cleared his throat. “... If you want.”

He did. He started at the bottom, leaning close to whisper hot breath across Hawke, and then he slipped the first of the buttons open. Hawke scarcely breathed as Anders worked, opening them and exposing more and more of him to the room’s still, chill air, until Anders drew his shirt aside and saw him bare.

“Everything you dreamed?” Hawke asked as he watched those copper eyes go wide.

(Hawke knew too well - he had spent enough hours staring at himself in the mirror the last few weeks. He had put on weight; it had thickened his arms, his hips. His jaw was softened to a hint of a double chin and he had stretch marks etched across his basket of a belly like the lines on an old cracked globe. Finally, obviously pregnant, no more hiding it.)

“Hawke,” Anders said, in a voice like prayer.

Hawke frowned, afraid Anders was teasing.

Anders stroked the hipbones almost hidden by a new layer of fat, and he couldn’t help but smile while Hawke kept scowling. Hawke might hate it, but it was for the baby, to protect against whatever fate had in store.

Hawke was more interested in what Anders had in store, and much more immediately. He made an impatient noise, because Anders was mooning over his fat ruined body and the little flagon of oil was in his bloodless hand, cap still fastened tight. He grabbed Anders’s naked leg and squeezed the lean muscle hard enough to make Anders wince.

“Impatient,” Anders said with a frown.

“You wouldn’t like me if I weren’t.” Hawke grinned.

“Yes, I would.” Anders said grimly.

Hawke’s cheeky look faltered. “What’s wrong?”

Anders focused on the oil as it slipped from the bottle onto his waiting fingers. “Knowing that you’ve done this with _him_... takes some of the charm out of it.”

“Anders, I -”

“Nevermind. It doesn’t matter.” He didn’t want Hawke’s excuses. He rubbed his fingertips together, coating them with a thin sheen, and glanced at Hawke again.

Anders workd slowly down his legs, smoothing the little knots here and there, and listened to Hawke breathe. Steady, slow, too calm; it was taunting Anders’s nerves. He pushed his hand up between Hawke’s thighs, running his chapped knuckles along the thin, sensitive skin on their insides, and he smiled when Hawke’s diaphragm twitched. He slid his fingers under Hawke’s balls and touched the tight ring of his arse. He tickled the slippery oil in a small circle, testing, feeling Hawke pucker while he got hard again and his toes started to curl.

Hawke smoothed the blanket either side of him, and then he reached toward Anders’s lap.

Anders knocked the hand away with his elbow. “Don’t.”

“What do you want, then?” Hawke asked with a growl.

“Nothing.” He didn’t want anything from Hawke. He wanted to take Hawke in his hand and - he weighed Hawke’s balls in his palm and pulled them gently.

“If you’re going to _sulk_ ,” Hawke said, and he clasped his hands up behind his head, “I’ll just let you get on with it.”

Anders smiled dryly.

Hawke shook his head at them both. “Anders, you know I - _gah_ ” Hawke gasped and scrunched his eyes closed as Anders suddenly slid a well-slicked fingertip inside.

Anders took it away and touched Hawke again. He touched the fluttering cord in Hawke’s neck, the underside of his arms. His gaze sank into Hawke, his hands followed while his eyes took their fill - Hawke’s chest, still broad and strong, flat and inviting, nipples hard as small stones. Anders flicked them with his thumbs once, and then a bit harder. Quick licks with the edges of his nails. 

“Feel good?” Anders asked, as Hawke made a sound.

“Yeah.” It felt good. It felt _strange_. Hawke’s chest was heavy like it was weighed down by small bags of sand and tingling. Energized, like the grains were slipping against one another, pouring through a sieve. The warming oil made Anders’s fingers glide in beautiful hot circles, caresses between sharper pinches. Anders carded over Hawke’s nipples and pinched them, pulled gently at the places where Hawke’s flesh darkened and peaked in almost-black embers. That darker flesh was electrified, burning and cold all at once. Anders’s nimble fingers twisted and toyed with him again and Hawke shivered as the feeling pooled inside - coursing down and down, deep veins of pleasure anchored Anders’s rough hands to the very pit of his stomach, where he was always ticklish with the baby’s squirming, where he was churning and knew he was _alive_. A wave of fire rose in his heart, warmth for Anders and the child he couldn’t forget. It welled up as his groin stiffened, as Anders worked those newly sensitive buds, it came like a sudden

“What?” Hawke craned his head up to look at himself. He wiped some of the pearly stuff from his chest.

Anders caught some of the little flow on his fingers. He furrowed his brow; then he laughed. “Hawke, it’s just...”

“You’re kidding,” Hawke said, realizing. He screwed up his face and moved to wipe his hand on the sheets.

Anders caught the hand. “It’s nothing. It happens. It just means you’re getting ready for the baby.”

“Great.” Hawke said. He wondered - and he hadn’t thought of it before, because what in Andraste’s knicker drawer did he know about babies? - how he would hire a wetnurse without drawing too many questions. (He bet Varric could do it.) He grimaced again.

“It’s not dirty. Here.” Anders dipped his mouth to Hawke’s fingers and kissed away the sweet drops. “All better?”

Hawke snorted a laugh; his cheeks were getting warm.

“It happens,” Anders said again. “It’s -”

“‘Natural’?” Hawke offered sarcastically.

“Maybe not for you. But the baby doesn’t know the difference.”

Hawke huffed.

Anders walked his fingertips on Hawke’s sternum. Then he stroked Hawke’s chest, made a firm line with the pad of his thumb, over to one of Hawke’s dark, hardened nipples. It beaded up with white-clear drops and Anders wiped them away.

Grumbling from Hawke, but Anders ignored it as he pressed with his thumb again. A gentle knead and pinch and a little more spilled.

Some of the tingling, some of the pressure, eased. Hawke touched his chest, Anders’s hand. “That feels good.”

Anders smiled. He did it again, he liked the way Hawke’s breath caught. He put his other hand between Hawke’s legs. He played with Hawke and Hawke started to swell again, gratefully. Hawke tipped his head back and nodded, and Anders bent over him.

He licked to clean them, tickled them with the tip of his tongue, curled around their heads. He flicked them again, hot and wet, and tasted more of that thick and sweet milk as it leaked. He fit his lips around one of the buds to coax the last of the drops and felt the tension in Hawke’s body _ramp_ , the tremoring hum that rose out of every muscle, like the buzz in the air before a tear of lightning. Trembling muscles, a slamming heart, breath like waves washing ashore. He kissed Hawke’s chest, bit, sucked Hawke’s nipple into his mouth, and Hawke gasped.

Anders came up licking his lips; Hawke’s eyes fixed on his mouth and Anders felt him full hard and eager. He would ask in a minute, or order, or beg. Anders traced his lips again, gave Hawke a squeeze - he wanted this to be his own victory (if giving Hawke exactly what he wanted was victory - he’d never tried _that_ before) - he smeared his palm with a small touch of oil and grasped Hawke’s cock. 

A slow, gentle rock of Hawke’s hips eased the head from its hood. Anders surrounded it in his slippery fist. He spread the oil down with a loose grasp and pulled back up with his fingers wrapped tight, down and back up, playing him, while Hawke hitched and panted like a mabari in heat.

Anders lightly moved over Hawke’s leg so he was between them. He leaned over Hawke and kissed him, the points on his chest again, the heaving dip of his sternum.

Hawke’s hand on Anders’s head gave an impatient pressure, and Anders let Hawke guide him down. The nub of Hawke’s navel brushed his mouth and he gave it a nuzzle, a lick. Hawke squirmed. Anders pressed his cheek and ear against him, heard the beat of their daughter’s little heart, and he felt himself unravelling, unravelling to ribbons, wide, red, silken, he wanted to wrap them around Hawke, bind up his hands and throat and heart and keep him safe.

“I want to … just feel ...” Anders’s brain was short-changed, everything was happening elsewhere. Maker, he was drunk, and all from Hawke’s look. The look of his belly, his balls and his hard length waiting for Anders’s attention, the sweet, white leak that glistened like pearls at his dark nipples, the unspoken pleading in his eyes. It shouldn’t have excited him so much - this was more than excitement, it was _euphoria_ , touching this body that had made their child, while it was naked and hard for him. The citadel of Hawke’s mind was still high above, ringed with walls, but half the battle was won; Hawke’s body had fallen, he was fertile and open - Anders had to be closer, he pressed a chaste kiss on the swollen stomach and then he dropped his mouth to Hawke’s hardness and sucked at him. He took Hawke almost full in, bobbed his head, let him free. He moved down to gently nip at one of Hawke’s balls. Hawke tossed his hips and Anders grabbed at his knees, digging in his chipped nails to keep Hawke still. 

“ _Anders_ ,” if sin had a name that would be it, and Hawke groaned again as Anders’s tongue swirled on his shaft.

Anders tasted sweet, coconutty oil as he held just the flush and fleshy tip in his mouth. The tiny slit, teased open, kissed, a plump little weight resting on his tongue. Part of him wanted to suck Hawke till he came, but he already had his hands smeared with oil - shame to let it waste - Anders grabbed the bottle off the blankets, re-wet his fingers.

“Relax, relax, relax,” Anders whispered, stroking Hawke’s cock again. He slid his fingers down under Hawke’s tightened sack to the wetted place between his legs. “Give me some room.”

Hawke hitched up a knee.

Hawke was tight, and Anders was too impatient to be really gentle. He stretched Hawke out with one determined finger, skirting pain and watching Hawke try to breathe, and too soon he pressed two fingers to Hawke and pushed them in.

Hawke let out a groan as they fit. It hurt, but it was good hurt, it was full hurt. Anders filled him up and he tossed his hips to feel the whole of his insides tighten around those slender fingers.

Anders burrowed his face against Hawke’s tented leg, rubbed up it with his free hand. It was shaking. He tickled behind Hawke’s knee, then between his legs to grab his cock.

Hawke felt his grip slipping. His grip on what, he didn’t know, but he was holding on by his fingertips and Anders was stroking him inside, sending electricity through his groin and making him bead and drip with eagerness. “Anders,” he begged, not for release but for something _tender_ while he was stretched thin and about to explode. He felt... breached, this wasn’t pain but it wasn’t pleasure, either, Anders’s hand around him, Anders’s fingers stretching him inside, stiff and aching, about to fly to pieces as little razors zipped along every nerve. It hurt, it was too much. But Anders was relentless, Anders was the wind that made him spin off-course, into the treacherous blinding tide. Anders was fingering that spot that made his legs shake and the whole bowl of his pelvis tense like hot iron.

“It hurts,” Hawke said raggedly.

“No, it doesn’t,” Anders said. But he eased off.

Hawke groaned, the sound that meant he wouldn’t hold out much longer. His hips were weighed down by the babe as he thrust. Anders’s thin, papery lips met Hawke’s panting ones. Anders’s fingers rubbed him again, inside, Hawke’s whole strong body quaked with the power of it. Hawke made a frightened sound against Anders’s mouth.

“Let go,” Anders said, or maybe he thought it; he didn’t know which.

But Hawke heard him.

Hawke arched as it took him, as the lightning rent him wide open; he clenched around Anders’s fingers and the burning waves finally rolled through his pelvis. He splattered Anders as he came, on his sunken chest and across his pale stomach. It seemed to last for a long time; even after he was spent, the aftershocks went on and on; the moment like death stretched into a long unbreathing minute. 

Hawke’s chest heaved. His clothes hung off his limbs like exploded bonds, he shook like he had been tortured.

Anders gathered Hawke up in his arms, his heaviness, his awkward body, his wild hair. The stars swirled in his eyes, he was dazed.

“What was that,” Hawke asked as Anders held him.

It was being powerless. It was being at someone else’s mercy. Anders kissed his sweating forehead and held him close.

It took a long time for Hawke’s heart to slow, for his breathing to steady. Anders held him.

“Don’t go,” Hawke murmured. He meant now. He meant ever.

“Not tonight.” That was all he could promise.


	18. Chapter 18

The following morning, at the Keep, Hawke summoned Cullen to his office.

“We don’t like visitors,” Hawke began flatly.

Cullen had seen that. Anyone who set foot in that mausoleum of a house would. He had been called to countless homes, here, in Ferelden, that had the same stink fear, the same silent terror - parents afraid of their own children, but protecting them all the same. That was his job, that was the duty he had sworn his life to - freeing men like Hawke, frightened mothers and fathers, lovers, of their terrifying burdens. Taking the apostate away would be a kindness, if the Viscount would just loosen his grip.

Cullen had seen men die with their hands clenched tight around the swords that had run them through.

“Leave him alone,” Hawke ordered.

“But if he _wished_ to return to the Circle,” Cullen began.

“Why would he want to do that? You’ll kill him.” (Hawke had burned the Divine’s decree that demanded Anders’s life. It had blackened and crumbled as paper should. No lightning had struck him, no holy magic reconstituted it in the firepit. Her words had turned to ash like any others. The chantry, maybe, was mortal after all.)

“The verdict was death. But I could petition Orlais for Tranquility. In deference to the Viscount, the city’s Champion, and maybe with the weight of my word … they might commute the sentence.” Both Hawke and Cullen knew that was lie. “He could live quietly and usefully, no longer a threat to anyone.”

Hawke’s lip curled. “He’d rather be dead.”

Silence.

Where other templars had grown great callouses from the friction between duty and the duty of a templar, Cullen had never managed it. He was always raw. But he tried, as if Hawke’s plight didn’t hurt him, to move on to the next piece of official business: “I’ve sent for an advisor. She was instrumental in getting the Ferelden Circle back on its feet after the … incident. She’s a mage herself, but if you can trust any mage, it’s her.”

Hawke looked uninterested. “All right.”

The Viscount didn’t understand how much they _needed_ her. Ser Bydel and Ser Ashe, other bullies in the ranks, were about to snap their leashes. The apprentices were frightened and aimless.

And peace didn’t come easy to the hungry. “Viscount, even on two meals a day, our stores are running low. If you could see a way to -”

“I’ve released all the funds I can,” Hawke snapped. “What about the Chantry?”

What _about_ the Chantry? Cullen frowned. Orlais sent nothing but promises that were broken before the seals on the letters.

Hawke looked at the mess on his desk. “You aren’t the only ones suffering, Cullen. I’ve got a whole city to feed. I’ve done all I can for you.”

That was that. “Viscount.” Cullen inclined his head, a small, grudging salute.

* * *

Cullen stomped out of the office. What did they expect him to do? No food, no grown mages to guide the young - he almost barrelled over Seneschal Bran, poised like a vulture outside the Viscount’s door. He waved his hand in apology.

Seneschal Bran oozed after him. “A moment, Ser Cullen.”

“I’m busy,” Cullen said, reaching the head of the stairs.

Lord Julius suddenly loomed up in front of him on the staircase. The bald man smiled. “Not so busy, I hope, that you’ve forgotten our little chat at dinner?”

“I haven’t forgotten,” Cullen said curtly. He tried to weave past Lord Julius.

Julius smiled a white-toothed smile. He grasped the railing with one long arm. He waited, with brutal serenity, for a real answer.

“I’ll bring him in as soon as I have the men to hold him,” Cullen said.

Lord Julius’s cold look was more threat than any words, and the tightening of Cullen’s lips told him he was understood. He stepped aside and Cullen broke past. “Time is short, Knight-Commander.”

* * *

The Hanged Man was a short stroll from the docks. The docks were sluggish in the winter, but there was a quiet desperation about the inactivity, like someone freezing to death. Trade had come to an abrupt end with Starkhaven, and the knock-on effect was a lot of impotent anger and anchored ships.

The snow had been pushed off the docks into the water. Varric had a ship’s name, and he moved out onto the water toward its hulking shape, huddled at the end of the dock. 

Varric strolled up the gangway, pretty as you please, and took stock. 

The captain was aboard, a dwarf about Varric’s own height, forlornly stringing a fishing line to try to pull some food from the stinking bay. 

“A dwarf on the sea,” Varric called, by way of greeting. “Mother always told me to steer clear of the water. She said we dwarves sank like stones.”

The bearded, itching captain straightened from his lines and looked warily at Varric’s smooth chin. He spied the heavy ring with the Guild crest. “Come to talk business?”

“I want to buy your whole shipment; chaff, weevils, rats, and all.” Lots of good protein in rats.

“I can’t, serrah. It ain’t my grain.”

“Whose is it?” Varric asked.

“I don’t know.”

Varric flicked his kinsman a coin to jog his memory. The captain bit down on it, insulting them both.

“You’ll want to talk to L’erd Julius.”

* * *

Anders heard the commotion outside. At first he paid it no mind, absorbed as he was at his bench with herbs. Then the front door opened, the noise redoubled, and faded again as the door slammed on its hinges and the heavy bolts were thrown into place.

Anders sprang up as Hawke himself barrelled into the room. 

Hawke was shaking something off of his cloak. It looked like eggs, splattered yolks and flecks of shell, and they were rotten, by the smell. Hawke ripped the cloak off and let it drop in a heap.

“What’s happening?” Anders asked. He followed Hawke as Hawke charged angrily up the stairs.

“Stay here,” Hawke ordered. He slammed the bedroom door behind him.

Anders went to the window and slid the heavy curtains apart. There was a crowd outside - or, he supposed, this was what you called a mob. A sea of faces mostly hidden by caps and masks, some bare and shiny and red with anger. The little sliver of light at the window caught attention. Something smashed against the window and burst - snow and ice. Anders yanked the drapes shut and followed the bear into its den.

The room was dark. The high windows of the bedroom had no curtains and let in just enough of the street’s lantern-light. Anders’s eyes adjusted. Hawke was cross-legged on the bed, shoulders slumped. He had changed, but it looked like he had lost his way in the middle of it, abandoned all his dirty clothes in a heap on the floor, his belt and weapons, and surrendered. 

“What’s going on?” Anders asked. 

“The people want a new Viscount,” Hawke said. 

“I always thought any rabble would be after _me_ ,” Anders said, drawing closer to the bed. He tried to smile for Hawke.

“Aveline will take care of it.” Hawke squared his shoulders. He winced and curled his arm around to brace his back.

“Are you all right?”

Hawke nodded.

The shouting was audible through the thin panes of windowglass. The more intrepid among the crowd had ringed the house. Something heavier than a bit of snow crashed against the walls and the windows shook in their frames.

“Where are Aveline’s men?” Hawke demanded.

Anders shook his head.

Hawke snarled at their helplessness.

“Ignore them.” Anders sat down on the bed beside him. He was burning, too. He wanted to go out and face them. They were brave against the blank face of the house, but let them see Justice. He would leave them nothing but bones. He would -

“They’ve never liked me,” Hawke said. 

“Who?” Anders asked.

“Any of them.”

Anders held his tongue, but he almost laughed to think that Hawke - violent, snarling, brutish Hawke - could need anyone to _like_ him. It was a joke at the end of a bad story.

Hawke looked at him in the dim light. "You don’t, either. That never used to bother me. But now I...” Hawke’s voice lost its footing, his eyes were glimmering.

This kind of soul-baring didn’t impress Anders, it hardly made an impression at all. He was too weary, and hardened, and wounded; he couldn’t be really kind to Hawke, even when Hawke was begging him to be gentle. To love him.

Anders tried to wrap it up and hand it back. (He didn’t want Hawke’s pain, he didn’t want Hawke’s hurt, he didn’t want _Hawke_ , he’d make a mess of it, just like he had everything else.) “It doesn’t matter.”

But Hawke had a sudden desperate spirit of confession in him, and he needed to talk. 

“I’ve tried,” Hawke said, looking past Anders at a point far away. “Running Kirkwall, making things right… but nothing works. I’ve tried cracking the whip and I’ve tried winning them over, but they’ve got this place wrapped around their little fingers, Anders. There are too many of them. They’ve got too much money. Everyone who should work for me is in some lord’s pocket. Every move I make, there’s another damned noble standing in my way. The people are all afraid of another war and… my back is killing me.” His voice cracked and he screwed his eyes shut. 

“I know it is.” Anders sank closer to Hawke and touched his face. “I’ll help you.”

Hawke shook his head, blinking back exhaustion, frustration, the threat of tears. “I’m just tired.”

“I know,” Anders said again, gently. Hawke had run himself into the ground. They had lost.

Silence fell between them, but they heard the rage outside. Another hail of rocks or snow or ice pelted the windows and walls. Hawke looked up at the high windows, guileless and vulnerable, like he was looking for the Maker. He breathed shakily, and Anders moved closer to him. 

“The Divine overturned your pardon,” Hawke said, as Anders reached for his hand.

Anders’s hand landed on Hawke’s and froze. “What?”

Hawke turned Anders’s hand over in his. He traced the elfroot-stained creases with his thumb, like braille. “They want your life. Starkhaven’s come to get it.”

“Starkhaven?” Anders asked. He had been living in this house like a newt in a bowl, without company and without news. All he had was Hawke, and Hawke told him nothing, Hawke kept the world to himself.

Hawke clasped his fingers. “I thought here in Kirkwall, I could protect us. I can’t.”

Anders’s hand betrayed him and started trembling. 

Hawke grasped Anders around the waist, pulled him close, and felt the tremors hum against his own body. He pressed himself into Anders despite his shaking. After a long day, after a dangerous day, Anders was all he had to turn to. 

“I’ll think of something,” Hawke said, but his voice was deadened. 

Anders wrapped his arms around Hawke, shifted so he could rub at the bow of Hawke’s lower back, where he knew Hawke was aching. Hawke tucked his head into Anders’s throat. Anders closed his eyes and he tried to burn this moment into him, making it part of what he was; Hawke’s silky shirt, Hawke carrying their babe, Hawke’s head nestled at his shoulder. A beast, tranquilized.

He would see Hawke safe - somehow - safely out of Kirkwall. Then… then let them come for him. He would take this whole city with him, every man, woman, and child. 

* * *

A few rioting peasants - the thinking went - were no cause for alarm, no call for drastic action. After all, it wasn’t as though the rabble out there ran the city. Kirkwall was a golden ship, and she was trimmed and steered with stately hands, carefully bred for the task.

Strange, then, that the riot seemed to have blown up a democratic wind. There were whispers in every corner of the Keep, like drafts. Nobles shaking their heads, commiserating with the lowly _them_ outside. The vox populi reaching something like an angry crescendo, and maybe, just maybe, stirring noble arses from their complacent cushions. 

Maybe. 

Or, maybe it was just a bit of fun, a bit of theatre. If the nobles took any real notice, it was because they hadn’t had a good opera staged in Kirkwall for years now, and it was the best show in town. 

Lord Julius would be the first to admit that of course, there was some discontent. And rightly so. No trade with Starkhaven, nor any of her allies, no money coming in. No food, either. The city’s storehouses were almost bare. The communal kitchens were down to ratbone soup. 

How fortunate, then, that Sebastian Vael, Lord of Starkhaven, happened to be on his way to Kirkwall. He should arrive tomorrow. And perhaps, Lord Julius let it be known, he could extend an olive branch of sorts. If anyone could make the young prince see sense… and he trailed off with an unassuming shrug of his gold-trimmed shoulders. All Starkhaven wanted was a single apostate - and perhaps a new face to sit on Kirkwall’s throne and sign her treaties, and trade would flow again. 

He smiled around the laden table, with its cheeses and its legs of this and that each in their own subtle, suitable gravies, at Kirkwall’s captains.

There were no disagreements.

* * *

The Keep

Prince Vael arrived at Kirkwall’s gates at midmorning, and sent a silvery young man, who already had the manners of an ambassador a hundred times his age, as his calling card. “Lord Vael has arrived. He demands an audience.”

“I’ll summon the Viscount,” Seneschal Bran said amiably.

“He wants to speak with Lord Julius.”

Seneschal Bran’s eyebrows flickered, a moment of surprise, and then his face passed into a placid, contented smile. “Right this way.”

* * *

News of the visitors, the audience going on right that very moment, passed through the Keep from rafters to cellars inside the hour. Not everyone’s antennae were created equal, and some got more or less of the fruit of the grapevine by dint of position and popularity, but even Aveline, ensconced in her Guards enclave, sensed something precipitous was happening. It was suddenly far too quiet. She made for Hawke’s office - after all, if there was trouble, Hawke was usually the place to start. 

Varric had the same idea. Fine-tuned political antennae like his worked over distance: even, say, from the Hanging Man. He arrived as Aveline was crossing the entrance hall. 

They paused to exchange some words without speaking. They were diverted from Hawke’s office with odd precision. 

“Captain Hendyr, come with me,” a little man said, joining the Captain and the dwarf. He was oe of the rattish civil servants who scurried around the Keep, stooped with premature age. He had already entrapped Knight-Commander Cullen, who shrugged almost imperceptibly at Aveline and Varric, over the man’s head.

“I’ll look in on Hawke,” Varric said, reassuringly.

Aveline glanced at Hawke’s closed door, and followed Cullen. 

* * *

Lord Julius had an office befitting the title. The furniture was older than most of the people in the room, but supremely well kept: stuffed, polished, and spotless. 

Much like Lord Julius himself, who was playing gracious host. There was a severe man in his office, standing ramrod straight. Julius waved expansively as Aveline and Cullen entered.

“Captain Hendyr, Knight-Commander Cullen. Please let me introduce Lord Vael of Starkhaven.”

Sebastian turned, and gave them a small bow of good manners. No one could forget he was the prince.

“He’s brought something I think you should see.” Julius waved them over to the desk. 

Sebastian joined them at the desk. He slipped a leather holder from his satchel and opened it, revealing swan-white paper with grey and gold inlays. It was a decree of Orlais, faintly scented, and an identical twin to the one Hawke had burned.

“From the Divine’s own hand.” Sebastian placed the broad sheet of parchment reverently upon the desk.

Everyone’s eyes swept along the gilded writing. It was short, it was deathly pointed. It invested in Sebastian a singular set of duties: Return the apostate for execution. Otherwise, make war. 

Lord Julius gave them a long moment to digest it, and then he pursed his lips. “I think we’ve indulged the Viscount’s taste for heresy long enough, don’t you? Ser Cullen, go and bring the apostate to the Circle where he bloody belongs. You, Captain Hendyr, go inform Ser Hawke that Kirkwall no longer has need of his services. As Viscount, or anything else.”

Neither moved.

Lord Julius looked from one to the other, and then to Sebastian, pointedly: “Lord Vael, how many troops have you brought from Starkhaven?”

“Ten thousand.” Vael was proud.

Aveline’s military jaw clenched.

“Two days out, unless I send word. Reinforcements from Orlais are not far behind.”

Lord Julius smiled grimly. “Quite. Now, Knight-Commander, Captain: unless you think Kirkwall is feeling particularly hospitable... _go to it_.”

* * *

Aveline made for Hawke’s office. Cullen followed, with Lord Julius’s command still in his ears. 

Varric took one look at the two of them, and sussed the whole story. There was only one way this was gonna go. You didn’t need a weather vane to tell which way the wind was blowing. He grumbled deep in his chest. When the blue-bloods played their games, they were all on the same side. The winning one. 

“Hawke,” Aveline said determinedly. 

“Aveline,” Hawke replied, with just a ghost of a smile. “What’s going on?”

“Boots on the ground,” Varric said, hands on his belt. “Starkhaven boots, and they’re pointed this way.”

“How do you know?”

“A friend in Orzammar said the ceiling was shaking.” Varric shook his head. “Prince Stick-Up-the-Arse is with Lord Julius, right now, down the hall.”

Aveline was suspiciously quiet. Never shy about voicing her opinion, it was almost as if she was relieved the dwarf was doing the talking. Hawke glared at her. “Captain, is the Guard ready?”

There was a guilty pause.

“Well?” Hawke demanded.

“Hawke.” They had traveled a long road together.

Hawke turned his head away, trying not to hear her. “You’re the Captain of the Guard. My army.”

“Kirkwall’s army.” It broke her heart to do it, but she couldn’t see this city - it had become her city, her home, the thing she protected like a son, shielded like a daughter - consumed again. “I won’t have the city in flames twice in one year.”

“Then I’ll raise an army of my own. We’ll see who -”

“Hawke, you know that’s not gonna happen.” Varric was tired of watching his friend twist in the wind. It was time to cut him down and bury him. “You need barons to raise an army, and they’ve all had a sudden attack of Andrastian zeal.”

Hawke thought. He paced to the window overlooking the city - his city. He turned, glaring at Aveline and Varric, until the templar caught his eye.

“You look like you’ve got something to say,” he snarled.

Cullen spoke softly: “You shouldn’t have pardoned the mage.”

Hawke fixed them all with a dangerous look. “Get out.”

Cullen went quietly. Varric stayed, willing to hear the Viscount’s last words, carry out some last service for someone who had been strong, and profitable, and given him the magic timber for some damn good stories.

Hawke stood at the shelves gazing at the marble bust of himself. “You too, Varric.”

“What are you gonna do, Hawke?”

“I’m going home.”

* * *

Hawke went out the back way. Aveline, Cullen, Varric gave him some cover. 

When he got there, the house looked like it had been ransacked already. Hawke saw books scattered on the floor, tossed out the library door. He called for Anders, and Anders came down the stairs at a run, in bare feet. 

“Hawke. Hawke, listen to me -”

“No, listen to _me_ ,” Hawke countered, trying to catch Anders by the arm. 

Anders veered away to his workbench and began stuffing herbs into a leather pouch. 

“Hawke.” Fenris loomed out of the library door. He kicked a book as he went. 

“What is going on?” Hawke demanded. 

“Ask the mage,” Fenris said darkly. 

“Hawke, you have to leave,” Anders said. He was packing … provisions, Hawke finally understood, watching him scurry. 

“No - Anders. They’re coming for you. They don’t give a shit about me. _Are you listening to me_?”

“No,” Anders said honestly, too distracted by the way he was rolling some of Hawke’s best shirts on his dirty workbench, getting them covered in powders and smears of oil. “You have to get out of here. Before they - before - while you still can. He’ll help you. He’ll -” 

Fenris, watching impassively. He and Hawke made eye contact, and he lifted a shoulder in a lopsided shrug.

“Anders,” Hawke said firmly, cutting through the buzzing panic in the mage’s head. 

Anders stopped short. 

“There’s no time for this. Any of it. They’re coming. You can’t be here when they do. Go now.” Hawke had taken on a mighty serenity, a self-assurance as immovable as the mountains. 

Anders stared at him. He couldn’t think. He couldn’t feel anything but a sense of being out of himself, like his feet stopped an inch from the floor. He looked dumbly from Hawke to Fenris.

Fenris had a bag on his shoulder, the same frayed one he had come to Kirkwall with, and just as empty. 

“Go with him,” Anders said to Hawke. When Hawke didn’t move, he turned desperately to Fenris: “Don’t let him stay.”

Another time Fenris might have relished this, but he tasted the future like blood, sour and copper in his mouth. 

Hawke shook his head a minute little fraction of an inch, and Fenris slid his narrowed eyes to Anders. “You did this. Never forget that, mage.”

Anders fought back his tears. “Hawke, go with him.”

“Hawke -” Fenris said impatiently.

But their precious minutes had trickled away. Hawke stared at the useless unraveled mage, the angry elf, and something inside buckled into place. Hawke grabbed Anders roughly, and pulled him close. His ten fingers dug into Anders’s slim shoulders hard. “Whatever happens, Anders: _stay alive_.”

* * * 

They came. The door smashed in, blown to splinters, and Anders drew himself up straight, like a brave kite against the gale, as the templars covered the floor. Hands grabbed him, pulled his spine straight and off-balance, put a warning knife at his throat. They dragged him to face the Knight-Commander and someone else, a polished silver chesspiece of a man.

“Where’s the Viscount?” Cullen asked.

“He’s fled,” Anders said coldly. “He left me here for you.”

Cullen’s eyes swept the empty landing above them. “Very well.”

“Search the house,” Sebastian said, eyes still fixed on the stone-faced mage.

“He’s gone,” Anders said again, insistently, looking to Aveline for help.

The look on her face said she wished it were true.

“Search,” Sebastian ordered.

Cullen and another templar mounted the stairs.

A slab of a templar fixed the handcuffs on his wrists. They put the chain around his neck. They slipped the leather bit into his teeth, to keep him biting his tongue and drawing the blood that would give him power. They were taking no chances. Anders gagged on thick leather and tried to spit it out, and felt the familiar yank on his chain. Justice surged and roiled and Anders crushed him, crushed him and smothered because if he resisted, Hawke would die. They would search the house, they would find Hawke, they would see he wasn’t right - they would cry possession and Hawke would die. 

He had almost regained himself. Cullen returned to the landing, his eyes swept the small party in front of the fireplace. They alighted on Anders, and Anders felt the tears come to his eyes. 

Cullen came down the stairs and crossed to Sebastian. 

“We’ve found him,” Cullen said. “He...” Cullen looked troubled. He couldn’t take his eyes off Anders. “He says…” Cullen leaned in and said something in Sebastian’s ear.

Sebastian’s eyes shot to Anders. “Bring him with us.”

Anders shook his head. No. No no no. He struggled, but he was bound tight, and the templar had a boot on his ankles and the chain around his neck was drawn tight. 

Hawke, escorted by a templar guard, came down wrapped in a cloak. Anders caught his eye. Hawke held it until Anders was grabbed by two templars and yanked off his feet.


End file.
